Hacking Flaw in Bitdefender Antivirus Free: Update Now

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Flaw permits full system takeover

Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition
(Image credit: Bitdefender)

Last week it was Trend Micro and Kaspersky. This week it's Bitdefender's turn to disclose a security vulnerability of its own.

Bitdefender Antivirus Free 2020 until today (Aug. 21) had a flaw that permitted malicious code injection by malware or a human attacker, resulting in full system takeover. 

The flaw gives an attacker "the ability to operate as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM which is the most powerful user in Windows, so he can access almost every file and process which belongs to the user on the computer," SafeBreach  researcher Peleg Hadar wrote in a company blog posting describing the flaw.

Dynamic link libraries (DLLs) are repositories of code that, to avoid duplication, are shared by different programs. Applications pull code from DLLs are they run, with many different programs often retrieving code from the same DLL. 

We'll skip the more technical details, but suffice it to say that you should update your Bitdefender Antivirus Free software, if it hasn't already updated itself, to version 1.0.15.138.

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Paul Wagenseil
Paul Wagenseil

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and even moderated a panel discussion at the CEDIA home-technology conference. You can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.