Finisterre finds Mac Virex vulnerability

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 01 March 2007 11:51

Business IT - Security

The Month of Apple Bugs may be over, but Kevin Finisterre hasn't given up on searching for vulnerabilities. A Secunia advisory released this week describes a vulnerability in McAfee's Virex antivirus program for Mac OS X and attributes its discovery to Finisterre.

Like some of the vulnerabilities disclosed by the MoAB project, the problem revolved around insecure permissions on a file in the /Library/Application Support folder.

This situation can be exploited to escalate the privileges of arbitrary files.

McAfee had already released a patch and an updated version of the software well before the public disclosure was made. While the patch only applies to version 7.7, the company warned that earlier versions might also be vulnerable and urged all customers to update to the latest build.

VirusScan for MacTel 8.0 and VirusScan for Mac 8.5 do not contain the flaw according to McAfee.

This is not the first time that security software has been the source of a vulnerability. For example, Symantec had to update its corporate anti-virus product last year following the discovery of a stack overflow vulnerability.