Re: Why Is Anybody Using WinRAR?

John McCue <jmclnx@gmail.com.invalid> wrote:

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:

candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

<snip>

>
Why would anybody bother with .rar any more?
>

 
Compatibility?

 
The more common reason is that rar is used in "the scene" for video
files (I believe because it was first, way back, with the ability to
split a larger than X size file into X sized chunks as part of creating
the archive).  And then taking the resulting "rars" and upon
extraction, recreating that "larger than X" file.
 

<snip>
 
Probably for Windows viruses too.  I am getting rar
attachments in spam and all the rar files contain a
Windows exe File.  To me, these are obvious viriuses.

Yes, malware of some form.  Those are 'rar'ed to try to hide the
contained exe from email filters/scanners that will remove a file named
*.exe.  Rar was likely chosen because some better filters will look
inside zip files but were never written to also look inside rar.  And
since W11's file explorer now knows how to open rar files, the scammers
get to "bypass email filters" and still "get their target to run their
exe".

A trick to bypassing most of the filters (when you do actually want to
send an exe) is to just rename the exe file (as the filters were all
written by windoze users who have been brainwashed by MS that the only
way to detect the type of a file is looking at the extension on the
filename).  notepad.eze passes right through the filters, you just have
to tell the recipient to rename it exe once they extract it.