Risk: Medium
Four new vulnerabilities have been identified in Symantec's personal firewall products.
Symantec has warned that hackers could exploit the flaws to render targeted systems inoperable or execute remote code with kernel-level privileges. The problems were discovered during product test of Symantec's client firewall application by an independent security firm.
Affected consumer products include Symantec Norton Internet Security and Professional, Norton Personal Firewall and Norton AntiSpam. Versions of Symantec's enterprise products Symantec Client Firewall and Symantec Client Security are also affected.
Symantec has released patches through its LiveUpdate service and technical support channels. Affected users can obtain the patches in running LiveUpdate in much the same way they would do to obtain new anti-virus definitions.
An advisory from security firm Secunia, warns that some of the vulnerabilities are fairly easy to exploit and may offer themselves to the design of worm programs. Due to the nature of the attack, via UDP traffic, the worm (if designed) could end up spreading as fast and violently as the Slammer worm exploited Microsoft SQL servers in 2003.