A weakness has been reported in Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh and Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.

The weakness is caused due to insecure permissions on the "/Library/Application Support" folder. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary code as the "root" user by e.g. replacing a certain application within the affected folder or tricking the Disk Mount scanner into launching an arbitrary executable by renaming folders.

Successful exploitation requires membership of the "admin" group and that "mount scanning" is enabled and configured to show the progress.

The weakness is reported in Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh 9.x-10.x, Norton Internet Security for Macintosh 3.x, Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh 10.0 and 10.1. Linux and Windows versions are not affected.

Solution
The vendor recommends disabling "Show Progress During Mount Scans" and setting the sticky bit for the folder "Library/Application Support" (see the vendor's advisory for details).

Provided and/or discovered by
William Carrel.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Symantec:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/2007.11.02.html

William Carrel:
http://blog.carrel.org/2007/11/security-advisory-norton-antivirus-for.html

Deep Links
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