Researchers from two universities in Germany have devised a method of turning an antivirus engine s malware scanning engine into an attack weapon. The attack is centered around malware signatures, an old malware identification technique that relies on filters to look for patterns inside the bytes of a file. An attacker could use the AV engine itself to destroy an organization’s files, in so-called antivirus-assisted attacks. The researchers propose several mitigation techniques to combat these types of attacks in their research paper. Security experts are not impressed with the proposed attack.
Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-explore-idea-of-sabotage-via-antivirus-engines/