Stupid question but is it possible to get a virus from an MKV file. (self.piracy)

submitted 5 months ago by Thebay to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Stupid question but is it possible to get a virus from an MKV file that is less than 24 hours old. I was streamed using VLC version 3.0.20 form the repose on Linux.

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[-] hondacivic@lem.sabross.xyz 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You're on linux? The odds of you getting a virus on linux are not 0 but very slim, since the userbase is very small.

Plus, viruses prey on people's ignorance. The usual "movie file viruses" are .exe files and can only be run on windows. Most people don't enable the option to show file extensions on windows, so a filed named "movie.mkv.exe" would show up as "movie.mkv" instead.

IMO, the odds of you accidentally running a virus by playing a .mkv file on linux are as high as the odds of you winning the lottery 3 times in a row.

[-] Thebay 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Thanks for the reassurance. I won't worry about it. After some thought, I also believe it's unlikely some one have embed zero-day exploits into a movie torrent from LimeTorrent.

[-] lud@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

Yeah, zero-days are usually expensive because attackers like to keep them pre zero-days once they are discovered their value diminishes significantly. So they are usually used for high value targets and not on random people downloading movies.