F-Secure spots dozens of archive vulnerabilities

We are used to hear about flaws being discovered in one product at a time. Sometimes even two or three. But certainly not forty, from forty different vendors. Security company F-Secure announced this week that they have discovered a similar flaw in a huge host of software, ranging from anti-virus suites to archive utilities. Many of the affected products included their own titles as well, which is the more unusual to hear from a software security company.

F-Secure has identified a slew of software that is vulnerable to crashing and other flaws when dealing with “malformed” archives, such as ZIPs and RARs. The crashes were cross-platform as well. F-Secure also claims the flaws could result in system compromise, at least in the laundry list of their own software that is affected.