Actively exploited in the wild
WinRAR Absolute Path Traversal Vulnerability
RARLAB - WinRAR · Listed in the CISA KEV since 2022-02-15. This indicates confirmed attacks in production environments.
Required action: Apply updates per vendor instructions.
CVE-2018-20250
HighCVSS 7.8KEVExploitation Probability (EPSS)
Very high risk100th percentile - higher than 100% of all known CVEs
Summary
In WinRAR versions prior to and including 5.61, There is path traversal vulnerability when crafting the filename field of the ACE format (in UNACEV2.dll). When the filename field is manipulated with specific patterns, the destination (extraction) folder is ignored, thus treating the filename as an absolute path.
Risk Assessment
An attacker can cause files to be extracted outside the intended directory, potentially leading to overwriting critical system files or executing malicious code.
Recommendation
Update WinRAR to a version newer than 5.61 that includes the fix for this vulnerability.
Other vulnerabilities in WinRAR
See all- CVE-2015-5663High
The file-execution functionality in WinRAR before version 5.30 beta 5 allows local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse file with a name similar to an extensionless filename selected by the user.
- CVE-2025-8088HighActively exploited
WinRAR for Windows has a path traversal vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code by crafting malicious archive files. This vulnerability was exploited in the wild.
- CVE-2023-38831HighActively exploited
WinRAR versions before 6.23 allow attackers to execute arbitrary code when a user attempts to open a benign file within a ZIP archive. The issue occurs when the ZIP archive contains a benign file (such as a regular .JPG file) and a folder with the same name, and the contents of the folder (which may include executable content) are processed when trying to access only the benign file.
- CVE-2026-14191High
An out-of-bounds heap write vulnerability exists in the RAR5 recovery-volume (.rev) parser of WinRAR and UnRAR. The RecItems vector is sized only when the first .rev file is processed, and subsequent files can supply a RecNum value validated only against their own TotalCount field, not against the actual vector size. A crafted set of .rev files allows writing a controlled 32-bit value (RevCRC) past the allocated buffer, corrupting adjacent heap objects.
- CVE-2019-25677Medium
WinRAR 5.61 contains a denial of service vulnerability that allows local attackers to crash the application by placing a malformed winrar.lng language file in the installation directory. The crash occurs when opening an archive and pressing the test button.
Original NVD description (English source)
In WinRAR versions prior to and including 5.61, There is path traversal vulnerability when crafting the filename field of the ACE format (in UNACEV2.dll). When the filename field is manipulated with specific patterns, the destination (extraction) folder is ignored, thus treating the filename as an absolute path.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS