Is it possible to get a virus/malware infection from opening a 7-zip (.7z) file?

Title says it all.

In particular, is there any step in the 7-zip decompression process that could allow code execution?

1 Answer

Potentially yes - if you do not have a very, very recent version of 7-Zip. There was an "out-of-bounds read vulnerability" which could be exploited to run arbitrary code, and also another heap overflow vulnerability. CVE-2018-5996 and CVE-2017-17969 - January 2018 could be exploited to run arbitrary code, and there is an even worse problem dating back to 2016.

Also see this blog post.