Hacker Drops Free Zero-Days on GitHub, Forcing Sudden 7-Zip Patch
A mysterious hacker just dumped a treasure chest of unpatched zero-day exploits on GitHub for anyone to grab, and the creator of 7-Zip had to quietly scramble to fix his legendary software before the internet collapsed.
An anonymous developer going by the handle bikini published a public repository named Exploitarium on GitHub. Instead of selling these precious digital weapons to shady government agencies or ransomware gangs for millions of dollars, this absolute chaotic good entity decided to just give away fully functional zero-day exploits to the public for free. The creator explained this bizarre charity work as the ultimate way to get fresh talent interested in cybersecurity, inviting anyone to claim the official CVE credits for themselves.
Among these freebies was a devastating exploit chain targeting 7-Zip version 26.01 on Windows, which allowed arbitrary code execution using some clever tricks with zone identifiers. The legendary and notoriously quiet creator of the archiver, Igor Pavlov, quickly caught wind of this public exposure. He silently pushed out 7-Zip version 26.02, quietly patching the critical flaws while masking them under generic, boring bug-fix descriptions in the release notes.
Dropping zero-days like hot mixtape tracks is certainly one way to force developers to do their jobs, even if it leaves millions of users temporarily exposed to actual malicious actors. The line between cyber-education and digital arson has never been thinner, and the tech industry is left wondering who will be the next victim of this anonymous Santa Claus of exploits.
Source: GitHub
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