Vulnerabilities Affect F-Secure’s Security Products

F-Secure's security products have many vulnerabilities of which one critical flaw allows illegal software to be run on an infected PC. However, the company has patched several of them including the critical one that impacts the anti-virus products of F-Secure.

This flaw is in the software's way of unpacking files that were compressed with the help of the LHA archiving technique. It could let a hacker to bring down the victim's system or even execute an illegal software on it, said F-Secure. Computerworld published this in news on May 31, 2007.

Even security vendor Secunia has rated the flaw as "highly critical". The flaw disturbs F-Secure's Anti-Virus, Internet Gatekeeper and Internet Security product suites.

However, F-Secure claims it has cracked the algorithm. That helped it to determine the URLs from which the worm variants would try to download so that the hosting providers could prevent the sites from running and also provide the systems administrators of the corporate, the list of sites they should hold back at the firewall entrance.

F-Secure said this flaw relates to a similar one found last September in the Gzip decompression functionality. Techworld published this in news on May 31, 2007.

The Gzip is a compact arrangement of blocks by employing the Deflate algorithm. In certain ways, designing a Gzip hardware decompression group of elements is basically designing a hardware utility of the deflate algorithm. There is a title to each deflate block, showing the nature of the compact arrangement applied on that particular block. Before applying the three compression styles, the Gzip needs a 32 KB window that includes decoded bytes known as the output stream, F-Secure said after the discovery of a fairly easy to hack flaw.

F-Secure's anti-virus program has a second not so critical vulnerability waiting for a patch. With this flaw a hacker could access the system and invade its confidential parts by way of a 'privilege escalation attack.

Another bug was detected in F-Secure's Policy Manager Server. Attackers attempting a DoS launch could use this vulnerability to exploit the security management software. Secunia rated the flaw as "less critical".

Related article: Vulnerabilities in Web Applications Invite Hackers’ Activities

» SPAMfighter News - 6/13/2007