Via Military.com, an AP article on the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion. This seems to be saying that the cause has been determined to be a methane clathrate blowout from the seafloor below the rig, triggered by heat from a curing sub-seafloor well seal, that sent a huge bubble of methane up the drill line.
The method, called an argument-switch attack, can be used against Windows security programs that use a technique called System Service Descriptor Table (SSDT) hooking. All of the 35 applications tested by Matousec featured this technique, including products from BitDefender, F-Secure, Kaspersky and Sophos, as well as McAfee and Trend Micro.
"We tested the most widely used security applications and found out that all of them are vulnerable," Matousec said in a paper outlining its research, published on Wednesday. "Today's most popular security solutions simply do not work."
SSDT hooking is used by many — though not all — antivirus programs as part of their mechanism for detecting and blocking attacks already running on the system. The technique involves modifying the contents of the SSDT. The company's research focused on kernel-mode hooks, though the attack is also effective against user-mode hooks, Matousec said.
"The results can be summarised in one sentence: if a product uses SSDT hooks or another kind of kernel-mode hook on a similar level to implement security features, it is vulnerable," the company said.
[...]
The bypass does not have a 100 percent success rate. However, if a system is running multiple processors or multicore processors, the attack is more reliable, according to Matousec.
"Today, multiprocessor (systems) or multicore processors are very common hardware in desktop computers," the company said in a statement. The attack can be run successfully from restricted user accounts, it added.