Vulnerability in Microworld Technologies Escan Av
CVE-2024-13990
MicroWorld eScan AV's update mechanism failed to ensure authenticity and integrity of updates: update packages were delivered and accepted without robust cryptographic verification. As a result, an on-path attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack and substitute malicious update payloads for legitimate ones. The eScan AV client accepted these substituted packages and executed or loaded their components (including sideloaded DLLs and Java/installer payloads), enabling remote code execution on affected systems. MicroWorld eScan confirmed remediation of the update mechanism on 2023-07-31 but versioning details are unavailable. NOTE: MicroWorld eScan disputes the characterization in third-party reports, stating the issue relates to 2018–2019 and that controls were implemented then.
Vulnerability class: Improper Certificate Validation
Published · last modified .
EPSS exploit prediction
EPSS: 0.006 (47.5th percentile), scored .
Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 47th percentile — 47.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.
EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.006 · newest: 0.006 · change: 0.000
Affected products
Weakness classification (CWE)
References
- blog.avast.com/leading-the-charge-against-guptiminer (technical-description)
- www.gendigital.com/blog/insights/research/guptiminer-hijacking-antivirus-update… (technical-description, exploit)
- securityaffairs.com/162228/breaking-news/escan-antivirus-mitm-attack.html (media-coverage)
- arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/hackers-infect-users-of-antivirus-service-that… (technical-description)
- www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-hijack-antivirus-updates-to-drop… (media-coverage)
- thehackernews.com/2024/04/escan-antivirus-update-mechanism.html (media-coverage)
- www.escanav.com/en/about-us/eScan-update-advisory.asp (vendor-advisory, patch)
- www.vulncheck.com/advisories/microworld-escan-av-insecure-update-mechanism-allo… (third-party-advisory)