Information Technology Security

By Lane Babuder, Hot Hardware There has been an ever-increasing number of vulnerabilities and malware rearing their ugly heads lately. One of the most common things these malware will attempt to do is gain elevated permissions to allow execution of its code without user interaction. Recently, a new vulnerability was found in the popular archival software 7-Zip that can potentially allow just that. 7-Zip is an open source universal compression and archive utility that is meant to work on Unix-like systems, and Windows. The exploit in question takes advantage of the fact that the Windows version of the software utilizes the system's help file format, known as CHM files. These help menu files can still utilize ActiveX controls, a functionality that saw its final release in 2013 and is today considered deprecated. ActiveX has been considered insecure for years by researchers due to its inherent elevated permissions, including direct access to executing shell commands as a privileged us...