A WinRar zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-38831 was actively exploited to install malware when clicking on harmless files in an archive, allowing the hackers to breach online cryptocurrency trading accounts.
I use WinRAR (as a switch from 7-Zip) because it works well enough, is fast and stable and has good compression. For me, switching to another Windows archiver would have no merit.
It depends. The RAR5 format used by newer WinRAR versions (the “old” one is still supported just well) can have smaller archives than 7z, but the opposite is also true. Still, yes, WinRAR is in my experience faster and more stable.
(Note that “as small as possible” is not usually the most relevant point. The best compression is currently reached with the ZPAQ format, but using it with maximum compression settings is painfully slow.)
I use WinRAR (as a switch from 7-Zip) because it works well enough, is fast and stable and has good compression. For me, switching to another Windows archiver would have no merit.
Is security not a merit?
It is. Coincidentally, security was one of the reasons to uninstall 7-Zip.
There’s barely any CVEs on that page. It’s likely a security researcher did some fuzzing of the executable and found a few issues at once.
Have you looked at how many vulnerabilities there’s been in things like Windows, MacOS, Chrome, etc?
I have. The point is that there is no software without vulnerabilities.
Definitely true, but that conflicts with this:
If you uninstalled software because of security, you wouldn’t have any software left :)
Also true. I was probably too impatient when I bought a WinRAR license over night. But now I have it and I use it. :-)
Y-you paid for WinRAR?
I even own legitimate Total Commander and mIRC licenses!
Is WinRAR really faster, more stable, and has better compression than 7-Zip? I haven’t used WinRAR in probably over a decade at this point.
It depends. The RAR5 format used by newer WinRAR versions (the “old” one is still supported just well) can have smaller archives than 7z, but the opposite is also true. Still, yes, WinRAR is in my experience faster and more stable.
(Note that “as small as possible” is not usually the most relevant point. The best compression is currently reached with the ZPAQ format, but using it with maximum compression settings is painfully slow.)