According to MakeUseOf, on December 9th, 2025, CISA added a WinRAR vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-6218, is a directory traversal remote code execution bug that lets attackers place dangerous files or install malware if a user interacts with a malicious file. Despite RARLAB patching this specific issue back in June 2025, the vulnerability is now under active exploitation by at least two distinct threat actors because too many users haven’t installed the update. This continues a long pattern for the 30-year-old application, which famously had a 20-year-old code vulnerability discovered in 2018 related to ACE file processing. Security firms like BI.ZONE and Synaptic Security are tracking the current exploits.
The Real Problem Isn’t The Bug
Here’s the thing: the core issue with WinRAR isn’t that it gets vulnerabilities. Every complex piece of software does. The problem is the perfect storm of its user base and its codebase. Think about it. How many people do you know who installed WinRAR a decade ago and just… never thought about it again? The app’s famous “infinite trial” created a massive, static install base that feels no urgency to update. So when a critical patch drops in June, by December it’s still a widespread, exploitable issue. The developers could patch the sky, and it wouldn’t matter if no one installs the update.
Legacy Code Is A Heavy Anchor
But the user problem is only half the story. The other half is what’s under the hood. WinRAR is a museum of compression formats. To maintain compatibility, it’s packed with decades-old parsing code for obscure, effectively dead formats like ACE and LZH. That legacy code, much of it written in a different security era, is a huge attack surface. Every custom parser for a forgotten format is another potential vulnerability waiting to be found. The 2018 ACE exploit was so bad they just ripped the entire feature out because the code was too old and gnarly to fix safely. That tells you everything. In a world where reliability and security are paramount, especially for industrial computing systems that rely on stable, secure software stacks, maintaining ancient code is a massive liability. For critical operations, you need modern, maintained tools, not software that’s a CVE database regular.
Why Are We Still Using This?
So let’s be blunt. Why does anyone still need WinRAR in 2025? Windows has natively handled ZIP for ages and can open RAR files with built-in tools or free, powerful alternatives like 7-Zip or PeaZip. These modern tools are faster, more secure, and don’t come with a 30-year backlog of baggage. They also don’t have a user base conditioned to ignore update prompts. The persistence of WinRAR is a fascinating study in inertia. It’s not the best tool, it’s not the safest tool, but it’s the tool people know. And in security, that kind of complacency is exactly what threat actors bank on, as shown by its recurring place on lists like CISA’s catalog.
Time To Break The Habit
Look, the writing has been on the wall for years. This latest episode, detailed by The Hacker News, is just another log on the fire. If you have WinRAR installed, you have two choices: update it religiously right now, or better yet, uninstall it and pick a modern alternative. The minor convenience of using a familiar icon isn’t worth the very real risk of remote code execution. In an era where software should be getting more secure, clinging to an app that’s a perennial entry in vulnerability reports is just asking for trouble. Basically, it’s 2025. We have better options.
