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"Note also that Bitdefender’s engine is licensed to many different anti-virus vendors, all of which could be affected by this bug."

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That's right. The list of anti-virus products that license the Bitdefender engine is extremely long. Actually, I wanted to include the most prominent Bitdefender customers in the article to give an impression. I ended up not doing so, because some license partner use the Bitdefender engine with disabled archive extraction. In this case, they would not be vulnerable to this bug, and I didn't want to mislead someone into thinking they are.

So if Bitdefender develops the engine, what does the anti-virus vendor do? Only develop the input (definitions)?

The definitions are licensed with the engine and can usually not be modified.

In a nutshell, most anti-virus vendors that are licensing the Bitdefender engine extend it with their own engine to improve their detection rate. For example, they support more exotic file formats and binary packers, or fancy heuristics, etc. Essentially this means they have the full attack surface from Bitdefender plus their own attack surface...

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