It’s 2025, and WinRAR has a security vulnerability that could help a hacker take control of your system. While most folks have stopped using WinRAR in favor of other archive tools, if you have WinRAR on your system, you need to update it immediately.

Using WinRAR Can Get You Hacked

WinRAR has a security vulnerability that can help a hacker bypass MotW (Mark of the Web) security warnings in all versions of the program before 7.11. The vulnerability has been named CVE-2024-31334 and received a medium-severity score of 6.8 out of 10.

MotW stands for Mark of the Web. It’s a security mechanism built into Windows that uses file metadata to flag potentially harmful files you may have downloaded from the internet. This results in the User Account Control (UAC) permission boxes you see before running a file asking you to confirm that you’re allowing an app to make changes to your device.

Thankfully, the issue is fixed in WinRAR’s 7.11 update. WinRAR’s patch notes explain the vulnerability as:

A symlink pointing at an executable was started from the WinRAR shell, the executable Mark of the Web data was ignored.

A symlink or symbolic link is a shortcut to another file or folder. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker could craft a malicious symbolic link and have it run malicious code on a target’s PC. Symlinks can only be created with administrator permissions, though.

The bug was reported by Shimamine Taihei of Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions through the Information Technology Promotion Agency (IPA) in Japan. The country’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (JPCERT/CC) then passed on this information to WinRAR’s developers under the Information Security Early Warning Partnership.

Starting with version 7.10, WinRAR also lets you remove the alternate data stream information like location, IP address of the archiving device, and so on, which can be considered a privacy concern. However, MotW uses this alternate stream of data to flag files.

It’s Time to Move On From WinRAR

WinRAR was once one of the most popular archiving tools for Windows and still claims to be the “world’s most popular compression tool” with over 500 million users, according to the official WinRAR website. It used to be Windows-exclusive but has since launched for Linux, macOS, and even Android. That said, the Linux and macOS versions are command line-only.

However, with Windows 11 now natively supporting almost a dozen archive formats, including RAR, 7z, ISO, and TAR, among others, programs like WinRAR have become obsolete for most users, and there are many alternatives. Additionally, WinRAR is a paid tool—you need to dish out $29 for a license.

The 10 Best Tools to Open RAR Files

Don’t know how to open RAR files? Here are the best file compression and extraction tools worth using.

This isn’t the first major WinRAR vulnerability, either. In 2019, WinRAR patched a serious issue that allowed hackers to disguise ACE files as RAR ones, potentially slipping malware onto your system. This was fixed in WinRAR versions 5.70 and above. Another WinRAR vulnerability in 2023 allowed hackers to run malicious code on your system when you opened a zipped file. The issue was reported by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and subsequently patched in 2023 with versions 6.23 and 6.24.