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Dangerous 7-Zip Vulnerabilities Flow To Top Security, Software Tools (theregister.co.uk)
mask.of.sanity quotes a report from The Register: Some of the world's biggest security and software vendors will be rushing to patch holes in implementations of the popular 7-Zip compression tool to stop attackers gaining full control of customer machines. Marcin Noga, Cisco security researcher, found and reported the holes to the platform, which could allow attackers to compromise updated machines, giving attackers the same access rights as logged-in users. FireEye and MalwareBytes are two of many products that use 7-Zip. "An out-of-bounds read vulnerability exists in the way 7-Zip handles Universal Disk Format files ... [which] can be triggered by any entry that contains a malformed Long Allocation Descriptor," Colleague of The Register Jaeson Schultz said. The flaws were fixed in 7-Zip 16.00, which was released Tuesday.
The myth of root is just that. The days of lots of people sharing the one client computer are long gone. For PCs, most of the good stuff is accessible in user mode. All the documents, email etc.
"7zip sucks too"
Totally disagree.
On Windows it is the best compression tool (all impressive merits of the 7z format aside) simply because it does exactly what you want: installs windows shell commands, which really are invaluable:
- Right click a folder and choose "Add to xxxx.7z" to make a 7z archive (last used settings) or "Add to xxxx.zip" to make a zip file (last used settings) or "Add to Archive" to bring up the options and customize everything. There are shell commands for sending via email, but I don't use those myself.
- Right click any archive file and choose "Extract to ...." to dump the contents into a folder in the current directory. There is another option to bring up a dialog and choose where to put the contents.
At the end of the day, 99.9999% of archive management is covered by these few commands and they really just get the job done.
It's as nice as right clicking a folder of MP3s and choosing "Play in Winamp". It was good that this was added to VLC, but I also see that Microsoft copied this and now I have an annoying "Play in Windows Media Player" option there as well. I *know* I can get rid of it, but life's too short.