Well, if you're one of the 500 million people who've used WinRAR over the years, the joke's on you. Researchers at Check Point Research uncovered a 19-year-old bug that created a security breach in your hard drive. In a
detailed blog post, Check Point explained that by renaming an ACE file with a RAR extension, hackers could manipulate WinRAR to extract a malicious program to a computer's startup folder. The program would then run automatically when your computer started. Check Point says the flaw existed for
19 years. In response to the blog post, WinRAR was quick to patch the vulnerability, releasing a
version 5.70 beta 1 in which it dropped support for ACE archives.
