I've reached out to BitDefender to make sure that the security flaw did not affect the Romanian cybersecurity firm's other products including its small office security suite, Antivirus Plus 2020 or GravityZone Security.

'This ability might be abused by an attacker, for example, to achieve Application Whitelisting Bypass for purposes such as execution and evasion.' 'The vulnerability gives attackers the ability to load and execute malicious payloads using a signed service,' said Peleg Hadar.

Worse, BitDefender's antivirus service will load the malicious code every time it is restarted, making it persistent and invisible to track.

The reason why the vulnerability is so critical is that BitDefender's developers have done a sloppy job in making sure that the piece of software-dubbed a DLL or dynamic link library-they are loading in memory and executing can be trusted and is actually the correct one which is properly signed by BitDefender. This malicious cyber exploit is often referred to as DLL hijacking. 'In my opinion, it’s very important to fix these kinds of issues so people will be more secure.' 'I’ve picked this particular software mainly because it’s a popular one which is probably used by many users, so this kind of vulnerability has a big impact,' told me Peleg Hadar, the security researcher at SafeBreach who discovered the security vulnerability.

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