Well, hope I got the Latin right. This is a bit unnerving (not this part–no application is perfect): “Antivirus software must open and inspect data in hundreds, if not thousands, of file formats. One bug in the software that does this can lead to a serious security breach. Zoller and his colleague Sergio Alvarez have been looking into this issue for the past two years and they’ve found more than 80 parser bugs in antivirus software, most of which have not yet been patched.”

“The flaws they’ve found affect every major antivirus vendor, and many of them could allow attackers to run unauthorized code on a victim’s system, Zoller said.”

It’s this part that is scary–the type of denial that has been the prelude to IT disasters for 20 years:

“Zoller says he has been criticized by his peers in the security industry for “questioning the very glue that holds IT security all together,” but he believes that by bringing this issue to the forefront, the industry will be forced to address a very real security problem. Between 2002 and 2005, nearly half of the vulnerabilities that were discovered in antivirus software were remotely exploitable, meaning that attackers could launch their attacks from anywhere on the Internet. Nowadays, that percentage is close to 80 percent, he said.”

Russ Cooper, a senior scientist with Verizon Business, had some criticism for the work of n.runs. “The research almost appears to be goading criminals into ‘getting better’ at attacking vulnerabilities… hardly helpful,” he said via instant message. “There’s no doubt that the list of vulnerabilities they have already published in security products looks daunting. However, historically, we have not seen this type of vulnerability exploited.”

And if I read this right, I do not want to do business with this company at all–he seems to be saying that there’s no need to fix it until it gets hacked: “Though Cooper agrees that antivirus file parsing vulnerabilities do pose a risk, he said there are several reasons they have not yet been the focus of widespread criminal attacks. For one, criminals are already being effective enough with their current tactics, such as sending malicious e-mail attachments. A second reason is that security software tends to get more scrutiny, meaning that any vulnerability that was being exploited would be quickly patched, and that any criminal involved in an exploit would be more likely to be caught.”

Coda

Security vendors have long known about vulnerabilities in their software, said Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer with eEye digital security. “Security software is just as vulnerable as any other software,” he said via instant message. “We all hire the same developers that went to the same colleges as Microsoft and learned the same bad habits.”