As in title. What’s your experience with it? If something isn’t executable, then it has to exploit vulnerability in order to run anything malicious. But does it happen often with mp4, mkv and other files like mp3 or epub?
I assume that if I use updated linux, then I’m mostly safe?
But does it happen often with mp4, mkv and other files like mp3 or epub?
Typically is not possible. Those media files are basically just data files (e.g. like a .txt text file) so media players normally do not look for anything to execute inside them. And frankly people should avoid any media player attempting to execute random code found in media files.
Case in point, the old Windows Media Player + old .wmv files used to be able to direct people to random websites to download/execute malware. Leave it to Microsoft to somehow turn a movie file into malware https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/106188/can-a-rogue-wmv-file-hijack-windows-media-player
it’s almost impossible that some state sponsored attacker will waste a 0day to attack random people downloading the latest movie from torrent. And when it happens all the news will talk about it
State sponsored hackers are a very small percentage of the threat actors out there. Also - they don’t need to exploit a zero day if you are willingly launching something on your machine.
I assume that if I use updated linux, then I’m mostly safe?
I don’t know why Linux users think they’re completely immune to malware. Yes it’s very unlikely that something gains root access if you run it without super-user privileges, but that program can still access your home folder and look at all your private data.
Probably because the vast majority of the pirate software available is for Windows, and there’s no way that program will run natively on Linux.
I mean, if I download a movie from freevirus(dot)com it is most likely that the movie will be a .mp4.exe and not a .mp4.sh.
