this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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I understand that sharing video, photos, documents etc. is relatively safe because the data is not executed in the processor as instructions. How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though? How can one be confident that it does not contain malicious addons? Are people just don't know the risks? Or are there protection mechanisms that I am missing? I mean since the software is usually cracked there is not much use in comparing checksums with the originals, is it?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Your assumption is wrong mail can contain executables. Picture can hold executable instructions and so do videos. For example videos and pictures in mail can contain virus. You are not safe just because you download movies and pictures

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Can you explain how can a picture holds a executable in it? Also you have to make the file executable to run it. Something like chmod +x random.mp4

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You are thinking it wrong about malware in pictures. They don’t act like an executable rather then injecting instructions to an executable program you are opening your picture in. In that case you don’t need the +x flag on your file. Think of it as a Trojan horse

https://gizmodo.com/malware-images-virus-photos-pictures-how-block-antiviru-1849572516 If you are more interested

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think it is very rare to find or even craft a video file that is able to allow for arbitrary code execution on an updated video player software like VLC. The same is true for photos or documents with the exception of office documents using macros.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

"Updated" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Lots of people don't keep their software up to date.

But yeah, the likelihood of any of us randomly happening upon 0days in the wild is pretty low.

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

Not at all. I work with development of various kinds and have my desk close to our senior it security specialist he says that we get daily that kind of stuff in our emails so I don’t see why they should exist less on pirated torrents

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

maybe you mean like exe files disguised as pngs?
actual malicious image files are extremely uncommon (and target specific image viewers of outdated versions, like imagine an archaic os like windows 7 or xp); libpng/libjpg that are used in most popular image viewers are open source and do not currently have any significant (discovered/publicly known) vulnerabilities

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