Uninstall Avast immediately, it's been found to allow anything access to SYSTEM-level privs because it includes a JavaScript interpreter in its watchdog https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/...

Its fixed https://twitter.com/avast_antivirus...

No it does not.
Yes, there is a JavaScript interpreter. And it has (had) unnecessary SYSTEM privileges and is not sandboxed (as in "this process runs with low privileges and has deactivated syscalls"). And even worse, it will run (ran) untrusted code.

This is (was) ALL a bad practice, and it probably will lead to sever vulnerabilities, yet to be found.

Yet those have not been found and Avast disabled the interpreter with an update.

Avast has always been garbage.

@sbiewald @zemaitis it WAS there. That's really concerning, as not everyone gets Avast main patches, just like how people don't get windows updates. It's also concerning as that's a *MASSIVE* slipup.

@Parzi
I'm not a fan of calling something "allow[s] anything access to SYSTEM-level", when this is only theoretical.

Nevertheless this is a sign of bad design (if a 'security' company still does not get privilege separation in 2020...) so customer may change the vendor (or stop buying AV at all), but hardly something requiring to "uninstall Avast immediately".

Thanks for the warning anyway.

@Parzi stop shouting at me. Avast is garbage and people who use it deserve to get hacked

Wasn't Avast selling their user data?

@Nanos Just stick with ClamAV if you so desperately need one. If you're not an idiot, you probably don't.

@PrivateGER i usually recommend MBAM or herdProtect (if you can find the client) if you need manual scans or something, as ClamAV has a low detection rate and isn't great.

@Parzi Eh, it's not that bad. Works just fine for me, but then again, I don't download shady stuff. ^^

@Nanos Kaspersky and AVG from my experience are the best

@zemaitis Out of curiosities: How do you measure antivirus product quality?

@sbiewald I measure it by how much of your CPU/RAM it eats while scanning in back, how much it eats idle, and how accurate it is when not tethered to the cloud (no, I don't count false positives as accurate. I get that they happen, and it's better a false positive than a false negative, but ffs bitdefender stop killing my fucking steam games and vm sofTWARE GODDAMMIT STOP I SAID)