Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Vulnerabilities

Critical Flaws Expose Symantec Customers to Remote Attacks

Symantec has released updates for more than two dozen of its products to address several critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited by remote hackers for arbitrary code execution.

Symantec has released updates for more than two dozen of its products to address several critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited by remote hackers for arbitrary code execution.

Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy revealed last month that he had found several serious flaws in Symantec products. The vendor managed to quickly patch one of the issues, but the rest were not as easy to fix.

Symantec published an advisory on Tuesday to inform customers that all the vulnerabilities found by Ormandy have been resolved. The expert has also published a blog post describing some of the flaws.

The security holes are related to the “decomposer” component of the Symantec Antivirus Engine. The decomposer, which is responsible for unpacking archive files, runs with SYSTEM privileges on Windows and with root privileges on Mac and Linux systems.

The list of issues found by the Google researcher includes memory access violation (CVE-2016-2207 and CVE-2016-3646), buffer overflow (CVE-2016-2209 and CVE-2016-2210), memory corruption (CVE-2016-2211 and CVE-2016-3644), and integer overflow (CVE-2016-3645) vulnerabilities. According to the vendor, a total of 25 Symantec and Norton products are impacted.

“These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets,” Ormandy said. “They don’t require any user interaction, they affect the default configuration, and the software runs at the highest privilege levels possible. In certain cases on Windows, vulnerable code is even loaded into the kernel, resulting in remote kernel memory corruption.”

The flaws found by the expert can in many cases be exploited remotely simply by getting the targeted user to open a specially crafted file or visit a malicious website.

In addition to finding vulnerabilities in Symantec’s own code, Ormandy also noticed that the company has neglected to update third-party components used in the decomposer. The expert said the security firm had not updated the libmspack and unrarsrc libraries for at least 7 years. Dozens of flaws have been identified in these components over the past years and many of them have public exploits.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Symantec says it’s not aware of any instances where the vulnerabilities found by Ormandy have been exploited in the wild. While most of the issues have been addressed through LiveUpdate and users don’t have to take any action, some of the flaws need to be patched manually.

Over the past months, Ormandy discovered serious vulnerabilities in products from several security firms, including FireEyeTrend Micro, ComodoKaspersky Lab, AVGAvast and others.

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Data Breaches

OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an...

IoT Security

A group of seven security researchers have discovered numerous vulnerabilities in vehicles from 16 car makers, including bugs that allowed them to control car...

Vulnerabilities

A researcher at IOActive discovered that home security systems from SimpliSafe are plagued by a vulnerability that allows tech savvy burglars to remotely disable...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Vulnerabilities

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft warns vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) could lead to exploitation before an email is viewed in the Preview Pane.

Vulnerabilities

The latest Chrome update brings patches for eight vulnerabilities, including seven reported by external researchers.