F-Secure Anti-Virus Could be Bypassed all "thanks" to a program flaw

Sep 27, 2007 15:17 GMT  ·  By

F-Secure is a corporation that, through its products, protects both consumers and businesses against computer viruses and other threats. One of their AV products, F-Secure Anti-Virus for Windows Servers 7.x, has been disclosed to have a vulnerability.

This flaw could be exploited by malware to bypass the scanning functionality. However, this has been dubbed as not critical by security experts from Secunia. This is only natural, as this vulnerability, by itself, cannot be used to cause too much damage to a single machine or network. Surely, multi-stage attacks are "fashionable" things as of late, in the world of hackers, but this vulnerability is not so dangerous. You need a lot more to start an attack that would do some damage. Furthermore, this only affects 64-bit server platforms and a patch has already been issue by the vendor.

So there is nothing to worry about, all you need to do is update to the latest version, and that's it, no more security bypass, you're safe. All you have to do is click on this link from which you can get the patch. If you see this and you are amongst the affected ones, don't be a sloth - click the link and stay secure! Also, you may visit the official F-Secure page for extra information on their AV solutions. And here is the official advisory where you can see more details, in case you are interested.

As for the ones of you that were curious on how this bug behaves, well, I left the tech-savvy part for last. As seen on Secunia, the vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error in the handling of archives and packed executables. This can be exploited to bypass the anti-virus scanning functionality by placing specially crafted archives or packed executables in the "system32" directory.