A recent post on Bugtraq has revealed a serious flaw in the core design of the freely-available personal firewall ZoneAlarm running on MS Windows. Thanks to the Win32 ShellExecute function in Windows, ZoneAlarm could theoretically be tweaked into opening an unsecured Internet connection and leaking information into web servers anywhere.

By introducing a Trojan into a user computer, hackers could theoretically force an Internet connection bypassing the security of the freeware firewall, provided of course that the affected user, just idly clicked on the product's pop ups without reading them. Of course, for the attack to be successful in the first place, malware would have to be introduced. But this can often be as simple as sending an infected attachment.

Although the attack has yet to be deployed in the wild, it could potentially be used to easily bypass the supposed security of the freeware version of ZoneAlarm and leave millions of users data exposed to anyone who wants it.

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• Software: ZoneAlarm