Update WinRAR Now to Protect Your PC From Attacks

WinRAR installer logo on a Windows 10 desktop

Do you have WinRAR installed on your Windows PC? Then you’re probably vulnerable to attack. RARLab patched a dangerous security bug at the end of February 2019, but WinRAR doesn’t automatically update itself. Most WinRAR installations are still vulnerable.

What’s the Danger?

WinRAR contains a flaw that would let a .RAR file you download automatically extract an .exe file to your Startup folder. That .exe file would automatically be started the next time you sign into your PC, and it could infect your PC with malware.

Specifically, this flaw is a result of WinRAR’s ACE file support. An attacker simply needs to create a specially crafted ACE archive and give it the .RAR file extension. When you extract the file with a vulnerable version of WinRAR, it can automatically place malware in your Startup folder without any additional user action.

This serious flaw was found by researchers at Check Point Software Technologies. WinRAR contained an ancient DLL from 2006 to enable support for ACE archives, and that file has now been removed from the latest versions of WinRAR, which no longer support ACE archives. Don’t worry—ACE archives are very rare.

However, unless you’ve heard of this “path traversal” flaw already, you may be at risk. WinRAR doesn’t automatically update itself. We’re also extremely disappointed that WinRAR’s website doesn’t highlight information about this security flaw and instead buries it in WinRAR’s release notes.

WinRAR reportedly has 500 million users worldwide, and we’re certain most of those users haven’t yet heard of this bug and updated WinRAR.

While an update was released back in February, this story is still picking up steam. Security researchers at McAfee had identified more than 100 unique exploits online by mid-March, with most users attacked being in the USA. For example, a bootlegged copy of Ariana Grande’s album “Thank U, Next” with the filename “Ariana_Grande-thank_u,_next(2019)_[320].rar” available online is being used to install malware via vulnerable versions of WinRAR.

How to Check If You Have WinRAR Installed

Read the remaining 19 paragraphs

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is Microsoft Flow?

Image
As part of Microsoft’s push towards cloud and mobile apps, they’ve invested in several cloud-only additions to the old familiar Office apps. One of these is Flow, a trigger-based system for creating automated workflows. What Does Flow Do? If you’re the kind of person who reads How-To Geek regularly, you’re probably aware of the drive for personal productivity that’s been raging for pretty much the whole millennium. Flow is Microsoft’s attempt at giving you the kind of automation for notifications, alerts, data gathering, and communication that will help you spend less time on boring but necessary admin work and more time on interesting (and productive) things. Think of Flow as IFTTT , but with a slant towards the office rather than IoT or hardware. Flow allows you to create “flows” (short for “workflows”) that are based on trigger events. For example, you could create a flow that would download the responses to a Microsoft Forms questionnaire to Dropbox regularly, or post a messa...
Read more