Is Your Own Anti-Virus Software a Security Risk?

InfoWorld has an interesting article explaining how fuzzing software and parsing bugs can be used to turn your own anti-virus software and security suite products against you. Scary stuff. This could be very damaging if these blackhat techniques become widespread.

Is the software we're using to protect ourselves from online attacks becoming a liability?

That's what Thierry Zoller believes. For the past two years, the security engineer for n.runs AG has taken a close look at the way anti-virus software inspects e-mail traffic, and he thinks companies that try to improve security by checking data with more than one anti-virus engine may actually be making things worse. Why? Because bugs in the "parser" software used to examine different file formats can easily be exploited by attackers, so increasing your use of antivirus software increases the chances that you could be successfully attacked... - InfoWorld