

WinRAR noted: "Such attacks are only possible if the intruder has managed to spoof or otherwise control user's DNS records."Ī couple of years ago a nearly-two-decades-old bug was found in WinRAR, affecting an ancient file compression format first developed in the 1990s.Īs for Positive Technologies, the Russian company was sanctioned by the US government earlier this year, with America alleging the firm had passed vulns to Russian state hackers instead of disclosing them. We have asked WinRAR for comment CVE-2021-35052 was fixed back in July when the vuln was first discovered. File types that could be opened without triggering further warnings in Windows, according to Positive Technologies, included Word documents, PDFs, Python scripts and.

Spoofed address resolution protocol (ARP) packets sent to the dialogue box from a hostile domain gave the researchers enough access to retrieve localhost information, run Windows Calculator, and so on. If the dialogue box received an HTTP 301 response indicating a permanent redirect away from WinRAR's servers, it would faithfully follow that allowing the researchers to send it wherever they liked and inject their own content into the box. Sniffing WinRAR traffic with Burp Suite allowed researchers to identify and then modify traffic being sent to and from the dialogue box. "This window uses mshtml.dll implementation for Borland C++ in which WinRAR has been written," noted Positive Technologies. The RCE itself could be induced through a WinRAR dialogue box which happened to spawn an Internet Explorer instance. Positive Technologies' Igor Sak-Sakovskiy acknowledged that many people have old versions of WinRAR installed in his firm's blog post about the vuln, writing: "We had installed and used the application for some period."

rar archive once and needed a utility to open it. rar archive, is not opened by Windows Explorer so WinRAR is popular among those who have to work with the format, or those who simply had to download a. Its most closely associated file compression format, the. WinRAR offers users a free trial licence before gently nagging users to buy a licence. Users should check their installed versions of WinRAR and update if it isn't v 6.02 or later, though the practicality of the attack seems limited unless your device or network is first compromised by other means. The vuln, tracked as CVE-2021-35052, has since been patched. While a vuln in version 5.7 of WinRAR may not seem like an immediate threat given that version was first released two years ago and has been superseded since, simple shareware/free-to-use software has a habit of being used long after its due date. A remote code execution vulnerability existed in an old and free trial version of WinRAR, according to infosec firm Positive Technologies.
