New WinRAR Vulnerability Could Allow Hackers to Take Control of Your PC

Ravie LakshmananAug 21, 2023Vulnerability / Cyber Threat

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the WinRAR utility that could be potentially exploited by a threat actor to achieve remote code execution on Windows systems.

Tracked as CVE-2023-40477 (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerability has been described as a case of improper validation while processing recovery volumes.

"The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a memory access past the end of an allocated buffer," the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) said in an advisory.

"An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process."

Successful exploitation of the flaw requires user interaction in that the target must be lured into visiting a malicious page or by simply opening a booby-trapped archive file.

A security researcher, who goes by the alias goodbyeselene, has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on June 8, 2023. The issue has been addressed in WinRAR 6.23 released on August 2, 2023.

"A security issue involving out of bounds write is fixed in RAR4 recovery volumes processing code," the maintainers of the software said.

The latest version also addresses a second issue wherein "WinRAR could start a wrong file after a user double clicked an item in a specially crafted archive." Group-IB researcher Andrey Polovinkin has been credited for reporting the problem.

Users are recommended to update to the latest version to mitigate potential threats.

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