WinRAR
New Amaranth Dragon cyberespionage group exploits WinRAR flaw
A new threat actor called Amaranth Dragon, linked to APT41 state-sponsored Chinese operations, exploited the CVE-2025-8088 vulnerability in WinRAR in espionage attacks on government and law enforcement agencies. The hackers combined legitimate tools with the custom Amaranth Loader to deliver encrypted payloads from command-and-control (C2) servers behind Cloudflare infrastructure, for more accurate targeting and increased stealth. According […]
WinRAR path traversal flaw still exploited by numerous hackers
Multiple threat actors, both state-sponsored and financially motivated, are exploiting the CVE-2025-8088 high-severity vulnerability in WinRAR for initial access and to deliver various malicious payloads. The security issue is a path traversal flaw that leverages Alternate Data Streams (ADS) to write malicious files to arbitrary locations. Attackers have exploited this in the past to plant malware in the Windows […]
Details emerge on WinRAR zero-day attacks that infected PCs with malware
Researchers have released a report detailing how a recent WinRAR path traversal vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-8088 was exploited in zero-day attacks by the Russian ‘RomCom’ hacking group to drop different malware payloads. RomCom (aka Storm-0978 and Tropical Scorpius) is a Russian cyberespionage threat group with a history in zero-day exploitation, including in Firefox (CVE-2024-9680, CVE-2024-49039) and Microsoft Office (CVE-2023-36884). ESET […]
WinRAR zero-day exploited to plant malware on archive extraction
A recently fixed WinRAR vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-8088 was exploited as a zero-day in phishing attacks to install the RomCom malware. The flaw is a directory traversal vulnerability that was fixed in WinRAR 7.13, which allows specially crafted archives to extract files into a file path selected by the attacker. “When extracting a file, previous versions of WinRAR, […]
WinRAR patches bug letting malware launch from extracted archives
WinRAR has addressed a directory traversal vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-6218 that, under certain circumstances, allows malware to be executed after extracting a malicious archive. The flaw tracked as CVE-2025-6218 and assigned a CVSS score of 7.8 (high severity), was discovered by security researcher whs3-detonator who reported it through Zero Day Initiative on June 5, 2025. It affects […]
WinRAR flaw bypasses Windows Mark of the Web security alerts
A vulnerability in the WinRAR file archiver solution could be exploited to bypass the Mark of the Web (MotW) security warning and execute arbitrary code on a Windows machine. The security issue is tracked as CVE-2025-31334 and affects all WinRAR versions except the most recent release, which is currently 7.11. Mark of the Web is […]
New WinRAR version strips Windows metadata to increase privacy
WinRAR 7.10 was released yesterday with numerous features, such as larger memory pages, a dark mode, and the ability to fine-tune how Windows Mark-of-the-Web flags are propagated when extracting files. WinRAR is a popular file archiver and compression tool for Windows that allows users to create, extract, and manage compressed files, primarily in RAR, ZIP, […]