Another Symantec worm

[unixronin]

A gaping security flaw in the latest versions of Symantec's anti-virus software suite could put millions of users at risk of a debilitating worm attack, Internet security experts warned May 25.

Researchers at eEye Digital Security, the company that discovered the flaw, said it could be exploited by remote hackers to take complete control of the target machine "without any user action."

"This is definitely wormable.  Once exploited, you get a command shell that gives you complete access to the machine.  You can remove, edit or destroy files at will," said eEye Digital Security spokesperson Mike Puterbaugh.

"We have confirmed that an attacker can execute code without the user clicking or opening anything," Puterbaugh said.

I've said it before, I'll say it again.  Not even three words, three letters:

AVG

And for individual personal use, it's even free.

Comments

Re: I'm trying AVG right now

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Just as a benchmark, I've just started a complete scan of vorlon, my Windows 2000 box. vorlon is an Athlon64 3000+ with a single SATA hard disk of 160 storage industry gigabytes, 149 gigabytes as computer geeks understand gigabytes, just over half full (78GB used, 70.9GB available).

I meant to report how long the scan took, but it doesn't actually include that in the test results and I was eating supper when it finished, so I didn't see. Ah well. :p But remember that there's two approaches to virus scanning. The safe approach is to scan EVERYTHING. AVG does this. If you want to appear to be faster, you can skip scanning files of types that you think are unlikely to contain viruses (i.e, you don't know of any viruses that propagate in that type of file). I know of several antivirus packages that do this. They're faster, yes, but they're less thorough.