TA16-187A: Symantec and Norton Security Products Contain Critical Vulnerabilities

Original release date: July 05, 2016

Systems Affected

All Symantec and Norton branded antivirus products

Overview

Symantec and Norton branded antivirus products contain multiple vulnerabilities. Some of these products are in widespread use throughout government and industry. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected system.

Description

The vulnerabilities are listed below:

CVE-2016-2207

Symantec Antivirus multiple remote memory corruption unpacking RAR [1]

CVE-2016-2208

Symantec antivirus products use common unpackers to extract malware binaries when scanning a system. A heap overflow vulnerability in the ASPack unpacker could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to gain root privileges on Linux or OSX platforms. The vulnerability can be triggered remotely using a malicious file (via email or link) with no user interaction. [2]

CVE-2016-2209

Symantec: PowerPoint misaligned stream-cache remote stack buffer overflow [3]

CVE-2016-2210

Symantec: Remote Stack Buffer Overflow in dec2lha library [4]

CVE-2016-2211

Symantec: Symantec Antivirus multiple remote memory corruption unpacking MSPACK Archives [5]

CVE-2016-3644

Symantec: Heap overflow modifying MIME messages [6]

CVE-2016-3645

Symantec: Integer Overflow in TNEF decoder [7]

CVE-2016 -3646

Symantec: missing bounds checks in dec2zip ALPkOldFormatDecompressor::UnShrink [8]

Impact

The large number of products affected (24 products), across multiple platforms (OSX, Windows, and Linux), and the severity of these vulnerabilities (remote code execution at root or SYSTEM privilege) make this a very serious event. A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to run arbitrary code at root or SYSTEM privileges by taking advantage of these vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities require no user interaction and are network-aware, which could result in a wormable-event.

Solution

Symantec has provided patches or hotfixes to these vulnerabilities in their SYM16-008 [9] and SYM16-010 [10] security advisories.

US-CERT encourages users and network administrators to patch Symantec or Norton antivirus products immediately. While there has been no evidence of exploitation, the ease of attack, widespread nature of the products, and severity of the exploit may make this vulnerability a popular target.

References

Revision History

July 5, 2016: Initial Release

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