Stupid question but is it possible to get a virus from an MKV file.
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.
Every once in a while security researchers would discover sophisticated exploits that would allow malwares to take over your computer via multimedia files, but those are actually rarely exploited in the wild by run off the mill malwares.
Unless you're an important person being targeted by hackers and three letter agencies, your biggest source of threat is running infected programs from untrusted sources, e.g. cracks downloaded from random torrents or warez sites, shady sites serving ads that trick you to run some executables, etc.
Seriously, I'm not trying to be a grammar nazi here. Unless of course that was just autocorrect being a dick, in which case I'll go walk off a cliff now... :/
Of course. :) I love learning about etymology and stuff, but I understand language is an evolving phenomenon so I try not to be a dick. Lol, hopefully, I succeeded.
Definitely no, viruses need 48-72 hours of incubation before the .mkv host becomes contagious. If the file is <24 hours old, I'd look for another source.
If you're worried your computer might be infected, you should consider swapping your case LEDs with UV lights to purify your system.
Like someone else said, it's unlikely. However it is possible but it would need to exploit your media player (VLC) and/or your OS. As long as your source is trustworthy you shouldn't have to worry, that's why the megathread is there.
As others have said, it’s technically possible, but it would extremely difficult and would require coordinating a lot of different variables which is extremely unlikely. I’m not sure there’s actually ever been an example of this type of attack outside of a lab.
In general media files can be formed in a way to trigger some bug in the media player, sometimes in ways that allow to overflow buffers and start ROP chaining.
About 8 years ago there was this media file going around crashing any iPhones that tried to play it with the integrated player.
Of course crashing is way easier than code execution. So overall your scenario is unlikely. VLC also does not yet know of any issues with 3.0.20: https://www.videolan.org/security/
Afaik, it's possible for any file to be infected with a virus. Videos themselves can be, and .MKV is a container of other files (video, audio, subtitles). The video source, audio source or even .txt containing the subtitles could be a malicious virus inside the container.
In theory, you could make a fake executable with the mkv file extension on a unix system, by making it a shell script with a bunch of garbage data at the end, marking it executable, and distributing it with a tarball. But the chances someone will do that is insanely low.
Also it has caveats:
It'd rely on your double clicking it, and having your file manager not warning you about it.
Video players wouldn't run the shell script code, if it'd run the file at all.
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.
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.
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.
if you really only played it and it didn't abuse some zero day in vlc (extremely unlikely), the there's basically zero chance you could have activated a virus.