One of the technicians better safetyof Google has discovered a zero-day exploit in the code of Avast antivirus.
The researcher is Tavis Ormandy, one of the technicians security of Google's Project Zero, the same man who discovered a similar zero-day exploit in Kaspersky's antivirus exactly one month ago.
According to the Ormandy survey, the error occurs when users have access to websites that are protected by HTTPS connections.
Avast antiviruses use encrypted movement to be able to detect potential threats, but it is alleged, according to the researcher, that they use a flawed method for parsing X.509 certificates. This allows attackers (if they know about it) to execute malicious code on the user's computer.
The only prerequisite for the execution of the malicious code is access to a malicious by clicking here which uses HTTPS, which is not such a far-fetched scenario.
Ormandy also released one Vulnerability PoC (PoC) on a Google page.
This is the third antivirus that turns out to contain zero-day vulnerability over the last 30 days.
We have referred to Kaspersky in the past, which included a zero-day bug that allowed an attacker to easily penetrate the victim's computer, gain system privileges, allowing him to carry out all sorts of unrestrained attacks.
The next was FireEye's antivirus, which contained a zero-day that gave unauthorized remote root access to the file system.
Meanwhile, Avast has reported that it has released an update that fixes the problem, and no action is required from the end user.
