Security researchers from SAFA uncovered four critical kernel heap overflow vulnerabilities in Avast Antivirus’s aswSnx.sys driver, tracked under CVE-2025-13032 and affecting versions prior to 25.3 on Windows systems. These flaws originate from double-fetch mistakes in the IOCTL handling logic, allowing local attackers to manipulate user-controlled structures to trigger controlled memory overflows and ultimately escalate privileges to SYSTEM. The vulnerabilities arise from the driver fetching the Length, pString, and pData fields multiple times without locking them into kernel memory, enabling attackers to alter values mid-operation. This leads to heap overflows and denial-of-service conditions due to invalid pointer dereferencing. Unlike traditional sandbox escapes, the attack requires leveraging Avast's own sandboxing rules to access the vulnerable IOCTLs, marking a unique inversion of typical exploit methodology. Researchers targeted Avast due to its widespread presence and large kernel-level attack surface, particularly through user-accessible drivers with permissive ACLs. Analysis prioritized kernel components with high IOCTL counts and focused heavily on ProbeForRead call patterns. Reverse engineering revealed shared code across Gendigital products, potentially widening exposure. SAFA successfully manipulated sandbox configurations through IOCTL 0x82AC0054, enabling the registration of a controlled executable under restricted permissions to exploit the vulnerability. During manual auditing, additional issues appeared, including loop-based double-fetches, misuse of snprintf when handling wide-character strings, and repeated size calculations that opened the door for memory corruption attacks. Avast patched the vulnerabilities in version 25.3 by copying user structures into kernel memory, enforcing strict size validation, fixing pointer handling, and removing unsafe buffer operations. The vulnerabilities received a CVSS score of 9.9 (Critical) due to low attack complexity, minimal privileges required, and complete compromise of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. SAFA demonstrated working local privilege escalation even on fully-updated Windows 11 systems. Organizations using Avast are urged to update immediately, restrict local user privileges, and audit logs for previous exploitation attempts. The incident highlights that antivirus drivers—despite heavy sandboxing and security layers—remain a high-value target for attackers due to their deep kernel integration.
A critical vulnerability in Apache Tika, tracked as CVE-2025-66516, allows attackers to compromise servers by uploading a specially crafted PDF file. The flaw impacts Apache Tika C...
Attackers with limited AWS permissions can still gain elevated access by manipulating boot-time or startup configurations on compute services such as EC2 and SageMaker. This issue,...
SeedSnatcher is a newly identified Android malware strain designed specifically to target cryptocurrency users. Distributed mainly through social media and messaging platforms, the...