Solution

If you encounter message with broken Opera application please download latest version using following link:
https://www.opera.com/computer/thanks?ni=stable&os=mac

Issue

If you keep up to date with the latest security updates on macOS you might have spotted warnings about the Opera application being damaged on your system. This is related to how our update mechanism works. If you see this warning there is nothing to worry about. Unfortunately you will have to reinstall the latest version of Opera from www.opera.com. If you won’t reinstall you will be stuck with the older version and will be getting more of those warnings as autoupdate will try to execute but fail each time.

Some more background on this issue

When we perform updates they are first downloaded into $TMPDIR. One of the intermediary directories created during this process used to end with the .app extension. We download the update package to this directory and perform further operations on it.

It turns out that there was a security issue in macOS, which meant .app directories that didn’t contain an actual application could also have been used by malware to execute code outside of Gatekeeper. Apple released a security update that closes this loophole, as versions 10.15.7 and 11.3 of macOS, which were released this week.

The fix causes our intermediary directory to be detected as a broken application, and a system warning is displayed, blocking any operations on the content of this directory and breaking our update mechanism. The fix on our side is to simply use a different name for the intermediate directory.

If you would like to read more about this issue please head to https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x64.html.

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