Blog

February 26, 2025 – In this final part of our series on COM hijacking, we will examine a custom-named pipe IPC protocol implemented by Bitdefender Total Security and detail our approach to reverse engineering it. We will explore how we could use COM hijacking and this custom communication to gain SYSTEM privileges (CVE-2023-6154). Additionally, we will examine how to mitigate the vulnerabilities discussed throughout this series of blog posts. Lastly, we will demonstrate how COM hijacking can be exploited to perform a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack on security products.

Author: Alain Rödel and Kolja Grassmann

February 12, 2025 – In this third part of our blog post series, we will cover the details of two additional vulnerabilities we found based on COM hijacking. The first vulnerability impacted Webroot Endpoint Protect (CVE-2023-7241), allowing us to leverage an arbitrary file deletion to gain SYSTEM privileges. In the second case, we targeted Checkpoint Harmony (CVE-2024-24912) and used a file download primitive to gain SYSTEM privileges.

Author: Alain Rödel and Kolja Grassmann

January 29, 2025 – In this post, we will delve into how we exploited trust in AVG Internet Security (CVE-2024-6510) to gain elevated privileges.
But before that, the next section will detail how we overcame an allow-listing mechanism that initially disrupted our COM hijacking attempts.

Author: Alain Rödel and Kolja Grassmann

January 15, 2025 – In this series of blog posts, we cover how we could exploit five reputable security products to gain SYSTEM privileges with COM hijacking. If you’ve never heard of this, no worries. We introduce all relevant background information, describe our approach to reverse engineering the products’ internals, and explain how we finally exploited the vulnerabilities. We hope to shed some light on this undervalued attack surface.

Author: Alain Rödel and Kolja Grassmann