McAfee & Symantec anti-virus libraries contain vulnerabilities

[Steve]

When your anti-virus product becomes a possible attack vector, surely you should really start to worry? Horrifically, this appears to have happened, with products from both McAfee and Symantec possessing vulnerabilities in their anti-virus libraries, which could be exploited by attackers to give them control of a machine.

Symantec said the flaw affects AntiVirus Corporate Edition, Brightmail Anti-Spam; Client Security; Gateway Security; Norton AntiVirus; Norton Antivirus for Macintosh; Norton AntiVirus for Microsoft Exchange; and Norton Internet Security.

Symantec has not released a patch, but said users can reduce the threat by disabling the scanning of .rar-compressed files and not opening e-mail attachments.

Meanwhile McAfee has fessed up to having a remote exploitation of an access control vulnerability in its McAfee Security Centre.

[The Inquirer]

If you run McAfee's software, it should have patched itself up through automatic update, but best double check.

[TheAnimus]

Its not really *that* worrying because a virus scanner should be kept upto date by everyone who runs one.

However its very worrying because virus scanners tend to run at a very high admin level where they can access everything.