Serious vulnerability in WinRAR allowed remote access on Windows PCs

A critical vulnerability in WinRAR allowed remote access to Windows devicesopens the door to different kinds of malicious activities. Details on the issue were released last Thursday (17) by the Zero Day Initiative.

The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher “goodbyselene” in June. affected the program’s handling of recovery volumes. Failure to verify user-supplied data correctly made it possible to save data outside the limits of the memory allocated to the software.

If exploited by cybercriminals, the space can be used to execute malicious code remotely on the victim’s computer, when decompressing a file with the tool. This gives attackers a chance to spread malware to steal data, perform ransomware attacks, and other malpractices.

tracked as CVE-2023-40477The flaw in WinRAR required user interaction to exploit it, trick the target into visiting a fake website or opening a malicious file. Due to this feature, it got 7.8 points in the risk index, which reached 10.

Update to fix vulnerability

The good news for anyone using the popular file archiver and archiver is that the vulnerability has already been patched by the developers of the utility. in solution winrar 6.23Released on August 2 and available for download from the RARLAB website — immediate installation is recommended to mitigate potential threats.

The update also fixes other types of recent bugs in the program, such as when a file opens incorrectly after the user double-clicks an item in a specially created file. Compiling also resolves a bug where interface themes were applied to file icons even with this option disabled.

While WinRAR enjoys immense popularity, a feature that makes the exploit advantageous for cybercriminals, No record of cyberattacks from bugsuntil now.