Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54565 readers

434 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others

Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):

💰 Please help cover server costs.


Ko-fi	Liberapay

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How likely is it to download malware with pirated movies? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

PDF is a complicated format, and the hacking vectors are often thanks to embedded javascript, or vulnerabilities in the parsing libraries.

'avi' is technically a container format, kind of like 'zip', it can contain more than video/audio.

That said, I've been pirating movies since the mid 1990's and haven't gotten hacked through a .avi/.mkv/etc. The 'bad stuff' was always in a obvious .exe/.bat or some sort of executable, but sometimes named to exploit people, eg 'foomovie.avi.exe'.

If in doubt, run your videos using mplayer on Linux and not on Windows, most of that stuff tends to target the easier to exploit and more commonly deployed systems, eg Windows.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yesh - the huge majority of malware in relation to piracy is from people deliberately running 'setup.exe' from some untrusted source, ignoring or overriding AV warnings and then wondering what went wrong. Its not from movie files and it certainly not from movie files on Linux.