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Sophos admitted that its anti-virus programs have a vulnerability which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.
The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error and can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow.
The vulnerability has been reported in Sophos Anti-Virus Small Business Edition and in Sophos Anti-Virus versions prior to 3.96.0 and prior to 4.5.4.
According to Secunia, the vendor has included a fix in the following versions:
- Version 3.96.0 of Sophos Anti-Virus (all supported Windows platforms, all supported Unix platforms, NetWare, OS/2, and OpenVMS) - Version 4.5.4 of Sophos Anti-Virus (all platforms)
Fixes are reportedly expected to be available by 2005-07-29 for Sophos Anti-Virus Small Business Edition on all Windows platforms, and within the next 14 days for the other remaining versions.
Sophos is the not the only anti-virus producer that has security problems with its own products. ClamAV and Ethereal are also vulnerable, the first having problems with at least four of the components used for processing different file formats.
Ethereal versions 0.8.5 through 0.10.11 include several vulnerabilities, one of which involves the zlib compression library; this is found in a wide variety of applications, and has been recently patched in Web browsers, the KDE graphical user interface and eMule, a file-sharing application, for instance. The bugs are all fixed in Ethereal 0.10.12.