March 15, 2016
His problem came from the fact that, at this year’s RSA security conference held at the start of March, Verizon’s ICSA Labs awarded Comodo the 2016 Excellence in Information Security Testing Award.
The irony of this award wasn’t lost on him, nor us, if we take into account that, since last December, Mr. Ormandy has been unearthing security flaws in Comodo’s Antivirus products on a regular basis.
The researcher first discovered that Comodo was forcibly installing an insecure browser that disabled SOP (Same-Origin Policy), a key security feature in Web browsers. He also learned that Comodo’s scanning process didn’t enable ASLR protection, and then that the entire antivirus was using incorrect ACLs (Access Control Lists).
Later on, he also found that one of Comodo’s tech support tools bundled by default with some of its security products was also installing an insecure VNC server with weak authentication, equally as bad as his first findings.