Free Republic

After being a staple on PCs for so many years, last month it was discovered that WinRAR, software used to open .zip archive files, has been vulnerable for the last 19 years to a bug that’s easily exploited by hackers and malware distributors. Fortunately, the software has been patched with the recent release of version 5.70, but after being unchecked for so long and installed by so many people, a new wave of malware is taking advantage. Check Point, the security researchers that revealed the WinRAR bug, explain that the software is exploited by giving malicious files a RAR extension,...

... A researcher has found a way to exploit popular archival utility WinRAR to remotely execute malicious code on users' computers, without any interaction being required. Iranian researcher Mohammad Reza Espargham found that it was possible to use WinRAR SFX 2.51 to add malicious payloads that would execute when users decompress archives. A specially crafted hyper text mark-up language (HTML) text file that is parsed and which attempts to download and run potentially malicious code can be included in WinRAR SFX archives, Espargham noted. The researcher suggested secure parsing of the text file, and encoding of the URL value parameter...