Vulnerabilities strike more AV firms, and Mac too

F-Secure and Authentium patch holes, while Samba flaws worry Apple users.

Users of

Mac OS X

, used to a cosy sense of security, have been warned of possible penetration vectors thanks to a slew of flaws unveiled in the

Samba

networking system used to connect

Mac

s to

Windows

systems.

An alert issued by

Symantec

‘s

DeepSight

threat team warned

Mac

users that even if their systems report being fully patched, fixes for the latest batch of vulnerabilities in

Samba

, reported in early May, are unlikely to be in place, as

Apple

has apparently not released updates to the system since 2005. While a default installation of

Mac OS X

includes

Samba

version 3.0.10, version 3.0.25 is needed to be safe from the latest flaws.

Details of the

Samba

buffer-overflow issues are

here

, and patches can be downloaded

here

.

F-Secure

meanwhile joins a growing roster of AV firms rocked by security flaws in their products in recent months, with four separate vulnerabilities in their products reported in the last few days. The most serious is a buffer overflow while scanning LHA archives, which can result in remote system access – a summary from

F-Secure

is

here

, and details from

Secunia

are

here

.

Less severe are a denial of service attack involving archives and packed files which can cause errors during scanning, another thanks to a problem with its

Policy Manager

, and a privilege escalation issue thanks to a flaw in on-access scanning. Information on each flaw is provided by

Secunia


here

,

here

and

here

, and more information is on the

F-Secure

lab blog,

here

.

Authentium

‘s troubles are down to some flawed ActiveX controls used by its product, which can apparently be exploited to gain remote system access and allow drive-by downloads from malicious or infected websites. Another summary from

Secunia

is

here

.

All users of both

F-Secure

and

Authentium

products should be automatically protected by the latest updates, but users are advised to ensure they are running the most up-to-date versions of their security software, with all relevant patches applied.

Posted on 01 June 2007 by

Virus Bulletin