14 DAY TRIAL // Avast is quite a popular antivirus especially thanks to its freeware license which allows consumers to take advantage of its remarkable features without paying for them. And this happens in a market dominated by top security products such as Kaspersky Antivirus and Norton Antivirus, which require users to buy a license in order to use them. But getting back to Avast, in case you're one of its users, you must update the application as soon as possible because older versions of the program contain a security flaw which may represent a real danger for computers.
Security company Secunia released an advisory confirming that a less critical vulnerability exists in Avast Antivirus, urging users to update to version 4.8.1169.
"Tobias Klein has reported a vulnerability in avast! Home/Professional, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges. An input validation error within the 0xb2d60030 IOCTL handler of the aavmker4.sys driver can be exploited e.g. to overwrite arbitrary kernel memory via a specially crafted IOCTL request," it is mentioned in the notification published by Secunia.
Although the vulnerability has been confirmed in version 4.7, it may also exist in other releases of the application, so updating to the latest edition is probably the best idea.
Avast Antivirus recorded a pretty remarkable number of downloads, no matter if we're talking about its official website or software download pages. On Softpedia.com for example, avast! 4 Professional Edition 4.7.1098 has 102,222 hits while avast! 4 Home Edition 4.8.1169 attracted 192,079 downloads. Two of its rivals, Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal Pro 6.0.2.621 and BitDefender Antivirus Plus 10.2 Final, attracted no less than 223,044 and 221,553 hits.
In case you want to download the latest version of Avast Antivirus, you can take it straight from Softpedia using the following link.