Symantec Client Firewall Denial of Service Vulnerability

eEye Digital Security notified Symantec Corporation of a severe Denial of Service vulnerability they discovered in the Symantec Client Firewall products for Windows. By properly exploiting this issue, an attacker could render the targeted system inoperable.

Affected Components
Consumer:
Symantec Norton Internet Security and Professional 2003, 2004
Symantec Norton Personal Firewall 2003, 2004
Corporate:
Symantec Client Firewall 5.01, 5.1.1
Symantec Client Security 1.0 and 1.1

Details
eEye Digital Security notified Symantec of a Denial of Service vulnerability they found during product testing against Symantec's client firewall applications. By directing a specifically formatted TCP attack against a target system running a vulnerable Symantec application, an attacker can cause a complete system halt. As a result, the targeted system would require a system reboot to clear the problem.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) initiative has assigned Candidate CAN-2004-0375 to this issue.

This is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems

Symantec Response
Symantec confirmed the vulnerability reported by eEye Digital Security. Symantec product engineers have developed fixes for the issue and released patches for all impacted products through Symantec LiveUpdate and technical support channels.

Clients using retail versions of Symantec Norton Internet Security and Symantec Norton Personal Firewall who regularly run Symantec LiveUpdate should already be protected against this issue. However, to be sure they are fully protected, customers should run Symantec LiveUpdate manually to ensure all available updates are installed.

• Open any installed Symantec product
• Click on LiveUpdate in the toolbar
• Run LiveUpdate until Symantec LiveUpdate indicated that all installed Symantec products are up-to-date

Clients running corporate versions of Symantec Client Firewall or Symantec Client Security should download and apply patches obtained through their appropriate support channels.

Symantec is not aware of any active attempts against or customer impact from this issue.

Symantec appreciates the cooperation of the eEye Digital Security research team in identifying this issue

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