14 DAY TRIAL // From time to time, the security companies are rolling out notifications and advisories informing us that a new more or less critical vulnerability was discovered, also coming with all sorts of software solutions. But what's more interesting is that most of these applications are usually antivirus products, exactly the ones that should protect our computer from viruses and other threats. Today's vulnerable solution is Sophos Antivirus in which the parent company discovered two types of security flaws. Secunia rated the flaw as moderately critical and sustained that it affects all the Sophos Anti-Virus products 'with engine versions prior to 2.48.0.'
Obviously, the best solution to avoid a successful exploitation is to update your antivirus tool to the latest version but the customers using EM Library and Sophos small business applications will receive all the updates through the auto-update functions.
"UPX Vulnerability - This can affect handcrafted UPX files.A corrupt UPX file causes the virus engine to crash and Sophos Anti-Virus to return 'unrecoverable error' leading to scanning being terminated. It should not be a security threat although repeated files could cause a denial of service," Sophos describes the first vulnerability.
"BZip bomb vulnerability - Provoked by passing a specifically malformed BZIP archive through Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows or Linux. The maximum impact of the BZip vulnerability is a theoretical possibility that a file could be crafted which would cause a gateway or endpoint to use up all of the available space on the disc volume used for Engine temporary files. This would probably bring virus scanning to a halt as well as impacting on other applications writing files on that volume," the description of the second security flaw reads.
It is proved once again that even if you installed an antivirus solution, your computer is not protected and, although you pay considerable amounts of money, your data can be easily accessed by any experienced attacker.