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Google Security Engineer Issues Sophos Warning
angry tapir writes "Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy discovered several flaws in Sophos antivirus and says the product should be kept away from high value information systems unless the company can avoid easy mistakes and issue patches faster. Ormandy has released a scathing 30-page analysis (PDF) 'Sophail: Applied attacks against Sophos Antivirus,' in which he details several flaws 'caused by poor development practices and coding standards,' topped off by the company's sluggishly response to the warning he had working exploits for those flaws. One of the exploits Ormandy details is for a flaw in Sophos' on-access scanner, which could be used to unleash a worm on a network simply by targeting a company receiving an attack email via Outlook. Although the example he provided was on a Mac, the 'wormable, pre-authentication, zero-interaction, remote root' affected all platforms running Sophos. (Ormandy released the paper as an independent researcher, not in his role as a Google employee.)"
What's worse?
1. That a security company had so many serious flaws in a flagship product
2. That the same security company considers it OK to take (on average) over 40 days to fix the issues. Remember that this is an Anti-virus product. One of the main use cases is to respond quickly to flaws in other software, to cover the period between the flaw becoming known, and the vendor releasing a fix.
3. That most clients won't see a problem with 2.