when downloading movies, series and anime they mostly come in those formats. Can they contain virus? if yes, do they get detected with antivirus?

  • heartlessevil@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Hypothetically yes. But consider that much like a virus growing in a petri dish, it needs an appropriate environment. A mp4/mkv/whatever file sitting on your hard drive that you never access is not going to be problematic. Even when you do access it, it is probably is not going to do anything unless you also open it in the viewer that the malware author intended the payload for. There is no general purpose video decoding malware. They target the players.

    • Wilker@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      as a reminder: in systems on Linux, remember to check the permissions of non executable files if you’re extracting them from a zip folder or similar, since those tends to preserve file permissions before you double-click them.

      • LiveLM@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Also for Linux: If you’re paranoid about getting hit by a video-player exploit, I think you could thwart most attempts by throwing your player into firejail (maybe a properly configured flatpak could also do the trick?)

    • EddyBot@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      oh there is a way without the user accessing it espcially on Windows: Anti virus scanner
      since most of them scan all downloaded files a zero day exploit for these software might be automatically executed
      bonus points: Anti virus software typically has system permissions too

      (likelyhood is still hilariously low)