PSA: A safety researcher just lately found a vulnerability within the file archiver 7-Zip that would grant attackers excessive privileges and allow them to execute code. Builders have not launched a patch but, however customers can shortly nullify this safety gap within the meantime.
Final week, researcher Kağan Çapar discovered and revealed a zero-day vulnerability in 7-Zip that may grant privilege escalation and command execution. Designated CVE-2022-29072, it impacts Home windows customers operating model 21.07 — the most recent model as of now.
Because the video under reveals, an attacker with restricted entry to a system can activate the vulnerability by opening the “Assist” window in 7-Zip underneath Assist->Contents and dragging a file with the .7z extension into that window. Any file with that extension will work. It does not need to be an actual 7z archive.
By operating a baby course of underneath the 7zFM.exe course of, the vulnerability can elevate the attacker’s privileges and allow them to run instructions on the goal system. Çapar blames this on a misconfiguration within the file 7z.dll and heap overflow.
The Home windows HTML helper file might also share some blame, as different packages can permit command execution via it. Çapar mentions an identical vulnerability that works via the Home windows HTML helper file and WinRAR.
Deleting the file “7-zip.chm” within the 7-Zip root folder can mitigate the problem till devs patch it. It is unclear when that shall be.