In a report released today, researchers from Group-IB said they discovered the WinRAR zero-day being used to target cryptocurrency and stock trading forums, where the hackers pretended to be other enthusiasts sharing their trading strategies.
These forum posts contained links to specially crafted WinRAR ZIP or RAR archives that pretended to include the shared trading strategy, consisting of PDFs, text files, and images.
I see an "invest in bitcoin" and I immediately think caveat emptor.
It is, but Linux has such a low desktop usage share that it wouldn't really be considered as a target for hackers. I believe that hackers really only target Linux servers, not desktops.
Barely anyone uses Linux, and among those who do, distros vary wildly enough between each other to the point of breaking viruses that it’s just not worth the effort to make viruses for them compared to Windows or Mac
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.
Honestly, this is like the first time I heard WinRAR has this big security vulnerability. But I am still planning to stay on WinRAR given its easy to use UI and unlimited free trial.
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.)