winrar exploit | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An Iran-linked cyber-espionage group that has been found targeting critical infrastructure , energy and military sectors in Saudi Arabia and the United States two years ago continues targeting organizations in the two nations, Symantec reported on Wednesday. Widely known as APT33 , which Symantec calls Elfin , the cyber-espionage group has been active since as early as late 2015 and targeted a wide range of organizations, including government, research, chemical, engineering, manufacturing, consulting, finance, and telecommunications in the Middle East and other parts of the world. Symantec started monitoring Elfin's attacks since the beginning of 2016 and found that the group has launched a heavily targeted campaign against multiple organizations with 42% most recent attacks observed against Saudi Arabia and 34% against the United States. Elfin targeted a total of 18 American organizations in the engineering, chemical, research, energy consultancy, finance, IT and healthcar...

Various cyber criminal groups and individual hackers are still exploiting a recently patched critical code execution  vulnerability in WinRAR , a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide. Why? Because the WinRAR software doesn't have an auto-update feature, which, unfortunately, leaves millions of its users vulnerable to cyber attacks. The critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-20250) that was patched late last month by the WinRAR team with the release of WinRAR version 5.70 beta 1 impacts all prior versions of WinRAR released over the past 19 years. For those unaware, the vulnerability is "Absolute Path Traversal" bug that resides in the old third-party library UNACEV2.DLL of WinRAR and allows attackers to extract a compressed executable file from the ACE archive to one of the Windows Startup folders, where the malicious file would automatically run on the next reboot. Therefore, to successfully exploit this vulnerability and tak...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

It's not just the critical Drupal vulnerability that is being exploited by in the wild  cybercriminals to attack vulnerable websites that have not yet applied patches already available by its developers, but hackers are also exploiting a critical WinRAR vulnerability that was also revealed last week. A few days ago, The Hacker News reported about a 19-year-old remote code execution vulnerability disclosed by Check Point in the UNACEV2.dll library of WinRAR that could allow a maliciously-crafted ACE archive file to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system. WinRAR is a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide, but a critical "Absolute Path Traversal" bug (CVE-2018-20250) in its old third-party library, called UNACEV2.DLL, could allow attackers to extract a compressed executable file from the ACE archive to one of the Windows Startup folders, where the file would automatically run on the next reboot. To successfully exploit the...

Beware Windows users... a new dangerous remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the WinRAR software, affecting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point have disclosed technical details of a critical vulnerability in WinRAR—a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide—that affects all versions of the software released in last 19 years. The flaw resides in the way an old third-party library, called UNACEV2.DLL, used by the software handled the extraction of files compressed in ACE data compression archive file format. However, since WinRAR detects the format by the content of the file and not by the extension, attackers can merely change the .ace extension to .rar extension to make it look normal. According to researchers, they found an "Absolute Path Traversal" bug in the library that could be leveraged to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system attempting to uncompre...

Imagine, You Open a Winrar archive of MP3 files, but what if it will install a malware into your system when you play anyone of them. WinRAR, a widely used file archiver and data compression utility helps hackers to distribute malicious code. Israeli security researcher  Danor Cohen (An7i)   discovered the WinRAR file extension spoofing vulnerability. WinRAR file extension spoofing vulnerability allows hackers to modify the filename and extension inside the traditional file archive, that helps them to hide binary malicious code inside an archive, pretending itself as '.jpg' , '.txt' or any other format. Using a Hex editor tool, he analysed a ZIP file and noticed that winrar tool also adds some custom properties to an archive, including two names - First name is the original filename (FAX.png) and second name is the filename (FAX.png) that will appear at the WINRAR GUI window. Danor manipulated the second filename and extension to prepare a special Z...