Earlier this month Check Point Research reported discovery of a 19 year old code execution vulnerability in the wildly popular WinRAR compression tool. Rarlab reports that that are over 500 million users of this program. While a patched version, 5.70, was released on February 26, attackers are releasing exploits in an effort to reach vulnerable systems before they can be patched.
One recent example piggybacks on a bootlegged copy of Ariana Grande’s hit album “Thank U, Next” with a file name of “Ariana_Grande-thank_u,_next(2019)_[320].rar”
When a vulnerable version of WinRAR is used to extract the contents of this archive, a malicious payload is created in the Startup folder behind the scenes. User Account Control (UAC) does not apply, so no alert is displayed to the user. The next time the system restarts, the malware is run.
