April 5, 2025 By Ionut Ilascu
A vulnerability in the WinRAR file archiver solution could be exploited to bypass the Mark of the Web (MotW) security warning and execute arbitrary code on a Windows machine.
The security issue is tracked as CVE-2025-31334 and affects all WinRAR versions except the most recent release, which is currently 7.11.
Mark of the Web is a security function in Windows in the form of a metadata value (an alternate data stream named ‘zone-identifier’) to tag as potentially unsafe files downloaded from the internet.
When opening an executable with the MotW tag, Windows warns the user that it was downloaded from the internet and could be harmful and offers the option to continue execution or terminate it.
