Virus Bulletin : Latest news - Black Hat round-up

Probably the most interesting presentation (at least from the point of view of the AV world) was Neel Mehta and Alex Wheeler's presentation 'Owning anti-virus: weaknesses in a critical security component'. This was clearly meant to be a controversial topic, and indeed they did demonstrate that some remote exploits were possible in a range of products. However, it seems more than likely that these holes have been patched, and they did not fail to notice that on the whole anti-virus software is written well, and has fewer such flaws than other systems. On the whole this was an interesting presentation, but I felt it could have been broader in scope, focussing on more than just anti-virus, especially as flaws in other security systems (notably firewalls) have been exploited by replicative malware (W32/Witty for instance), whereas, to date, no Anti-Virus software I am aware of has been.