The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Exploit broker aims marketing machine at Unix app crack

Anonymous Coward

you need to have a product 

Stop

Apparently no one cares about a Clam AV vulnerability, try selling something people can get excited about like a remotely exploitable Vista/IE7 attack those are always great for business.Make it even better add a .net component and charge the same low low price.Reminds me of real dead crunchy frog.

Dave

Interesting Moral Dilemma 

Pirate

So they've rejected some submissions because the discoverer reverse-engineered the code. This doesn't make the vulnerability go away, and doesn't stop someone who wants to exploit it from also reverse-engineering the code (such people won't be too worried about the legality of doing so). Also, no doubt the immediate response from the company that wrote the software would be to sue the discoverer and anyone else their lawyers could think of for trying to make money from it instead of fixing the code, so the rest of the user base would still be vulnerable.

Oliver Wilson

Shurely Shome Mishtake 

..."lightly killed" frog, surely?

Dazed and Confused

more profitable 

Pirate

Surely the best approach to finding a "remotely exploitable Vista/IE7" would be to write a fix, then patent it. Then you could simply hold M$ to ransom.

paul brain

Who honestly runs AV on their UNIX systems anyway ?? 

Paris Hilton

The exploit would be honestly concerning if anyone actually ran the product.

If you conducted a straw poll of Ubuntu/SuSE/Fedora users if they 'honestly' ran AntiVirus software, the answer would be ???

Making the xploit worth ?

** I've added Paris Hilton as the ICON, because she's really smart with all IT related issues - an inspiration to all.

Anonymous Coward

I'm pretty sure... 

Alert

...that the Clam AV team would have patched the vuln by now?

Andy Shaw

@Paul Brain - I run AV on UNIX 

Paul, you've not considered that Clam AV is often used to scan emails that will be read by clients on Windows machines. Clam doesn't just scan for UNIX-targetted viruses, y'know.

Chris Ciazynski

What about ClamWin? 

Stop

Isn't ClamWin based on the same code? or is the vulnerability only on Unix?

http://www.clamwin.com/

Snert Lee

Ownership? 

Perhaps WabiSabiLabi would have better luck selling their vulnerabilities if there was some sort of copyright enforcement mechanism to ensure that once you bought the item, you'd be the only one to own it.

VxDRM might be one solution. Hardware dongles for virus writing kits could be another.