The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an urgent warning about a serious security flaw in WinRAR. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-6218, is already being exploited in real-world attacks. Since WinRAR is used by millions of Windows users, we can guess the seriousness of it.
The flaw is a path traversal bug that lets attackers slip files outside the safe extraction folder. Normally, when you open a ZIP or RAR file, WinRAR places its contents in a controlled directory. But this vulnerability allows a malicious archive to break out of that location and drop files elsewhere on the system.
If a user opens such a file, an attacker can place and run code on the machine. The threat becomes even more dangerous if the user has administrator rights, as this could give hackers full access to the system, including the ability to steal data or deploy ransomware.
Read: How to Repair Broken or Corrupted Zip Files
CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list on December 9, confirming that hackers are already taking advantage of it. Federal agencies have been ordered to patch WinRAR by December 30, but everyday users and businesses are strongly advised to act much sooner.
The fix is simple: download the latest version of WinRAR from the official RARLAB website and install it right away. If updating is not possible, CISA says users should stop using the software until a patch is applied.
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