Avira – Critical CSRF flaw Vulnerability puts millions users at risk
Pierluigi Paganini
September 20, 2014
Egyptian bug hunter discovered that Avira Website is affected by CSRF flaw that allows attackers to hijack users’ accounts and access to their online backup.
What do you think about if tell you that an antivirus could represent a menace for your system? Antivirus like any other kind of software could be exploited by threat actors to compromise the machine as already explained my
previous post.
The popular antivirus software Avira that includes a Secure Backup service is vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take over the user’s account.
The Egyptian 16 year-old expert Mazen Gamal reported to
The Hacker News that the Avira Website is affected by a
CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) vulnerability that allows an
attacker to hijack users’ accounts and access to their online secure cloud backup files.
The CSRF vulnerability potentially puts millions of Avira users’ account at risk.
CSRF allows an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application once he
is authenticated, in a typical attack scheme attacker sends a link via email or through a social media platform, or share a specially crafted HTML exploit page to trick the victim into executing actions of the attacker’s choosing.
In this specific case an attacker could use CSRF exploit to trick a victim into accessing a malicious link that contains requests which will replace victim’s email ID on Avira account with attacker’s email ID. This this CSRF attack the victim’s account could be easily compromised, by replacing the email address the attacker can easily reset the password of the victim’s account running the forget password procedure, bacause
Avira will send the password reset link to attacker’s email ID instead of the victim’s ID.
Once gained the access to the victim’s account the attacker would be able to retrieve its online backup, which include files the user has stored on the Online backup Software (
https://dav.backup.avira.com/).
“I found a CSRF vulnerability in Avira can lead me to full account takeover of any Avira user account,” Gamal said via an email to The Hacker News. “The impact of the account takeover allowed me to Open the Backup files of the victim and also view the license codes for the affected user.”
Gamal also provided a Proof-of-Concept video to demonstrate its discovery.
Gamal has reported the vulnerability to the Avira Security Team on August 21th, the team admitted the flaw and fixed the CSRF bug on their website, but the Secure online backup service “is still vulnerable to hackers until Avira will not offer a offline password layer for decrypting files locally.”
Mazen Gamal has been recognized as an official bug hunter by Avira.
Pierluigi Paganini
(Security Affairs – AVIRA, CSRF)
