Debasis Mohanty has discovered a weakness in various ZoneAlarm products, which can be exploited to bypass security features provided by the product.

The weakness is caused due to the Program Control feature failing to correctly identify and stop processes that use the Internet Explorer browser to make outgoing connections via the "ShowHTMLDialog()" API in MSHTML.DLL. This may be exploited by malware to send potentially sensitive information out from an affected system.

The weakness has been confirmed in ZoneAlarm Pro 6.0.667 and reported in the following products:
* ZoneAlarm Pro 6.0.x
* ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 6.0.x
* ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware with Firewall 6.1.x
* ZoneAlarm Antivirus with Firewall 6.0.x

Note: The free version of ZoneAlarm Firewall does not support the "Advanced Program Control" feature, and hence, does not prevent such bypass techniques.

Secunia does not normally regard this kind of security bypass in personal firewalls as a vulnerability. However, Secunia has decided to write about this particular issue because Zone Labs is marketing the product as being able to stop this kind of attack via the "Advanced Program Control" functionality.

Solution
Do not run untrusted programs.

Provided and/or discovered by
Debasis Mohanty

Original Advisory
http://www.hackingspirits.com/vuln-rnd/vuln-rnd.html

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area