this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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At the risk of asking an incredibly stupid question, but if I only ever torrent video/audio, scan everything I download with defender, and only ever use a recently updated version of vlc, what's the risk?
I remember getting viruses in ye olden days, but afaik the main problem is malware now.
Risk is practically nothing in your case, because you're being careful, and know what you're doing. You won't run a binary when you were expecting the Barbie movie, for example.
If you were downloading binaries, then your risk is significant, but even then, unless you're downloading new releases immediately, it's likely that your antivirus will catch the new popular ransomware after a few days, when a few thousands of people have become infected. Governments won't employ valuable zero-days on any rando who just wants to see their new isekai episode.
If you're using Windows, just make sure file extensions are visible and that your file isn't named Movie.mp4.exe
This is about a game, which is a .exe. In your case, it's probably not an issue, but games will be. Pdfs also had an issue for a while, but I think that's solved. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any video/audio codec or VLC issues to be worried about though, so you should be good.
Movies and audio are very rarely infected, almost never. That depends on bugged software, so that you can be relatively safe of.
Executables... well... no anti virus can protect you in reality from dumb double-clicks. This is because viruses are trained against anti virus software until they can't be recognized. There are mathematically an infinite number of patterns to run a program to trick all kinds of anti viruses. So in reality you can't be safe. Once that's done by an expert virus creator, the best you have to protect you is a behavioral detection of viruses, which may or may not work.
So, don't rely on anti viruses. They barely protect you from script kiddies and legacy viruses.
why do you have to pirate VLC, just go to the website and download (or even compile from source)
He doesn’t pirate VLC, he pirates the audio/video he plays with it and asks if there is any danger in that.
Not what they're asking, read closely. They're curious about the risk from using pirated audio or video material (not executables). VLC is only mentioned as their player of choice, so it's easy to assume they've already got it installed.