Lab02.7z

When a user opened Lab02.7z and double-clicked what looked like a Word document, they unknowingly bypassed all of Windows' built-in security warnings. A hidden would launch in the background.

In late 2024, amidst the ongoing conflict, Ukrainian government and civilian organizations began receiving highly targeted . These emails appeared to be urgent documents, but tucked inside was a double-archived file: Lab02.7z . The Weapon: CVE-2025-0411 Lab02.7z

The "story" of this file is actually the story of a clever vulnerability discovered in the popular archiver. When a user opened Lab02

: Normally, Windows uses a feature called Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW) to flag files downloaded from the internet as "unsafe," preventing them from running automatically. These emails appeared to be urgent documents, but

The caught the campaign in September 2024. They worked with the developer of 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov, who released a patch in version 24.09 on November 30, 2024, to fix the MOTW bypass.

: Hackers discovered that if they buried a malicious file inside a nested archive (like a ZIP inside Lab02.7z ), 7-Zip would fail to pass that "unsafe" flag to the inner file when extracted.