A game I downloaded after following the Megathread activated Windows Defender. Most searches in the reddit showed that it was a False Positive but I checked in Virus Total just in case and found this. The website was RePack-Games (I read the note but I didn’t find the game on the Goat sites), the game was Dynasty Warriors 8. I’d like to ask what my next course of action is here. The game also wouldn’t load after the cutscene when u select a character.
movies, music and pdfs/ebooks should be “okay” to pirate though, since they are more read than executable programs, right …
Not really, even in pdf there could be exploits hidden and I bet the same goes for epub files
okay I will only torrent
.txtascii-encoded files then and open them in nano, this will make me totally secure.… And open all other files I download in a sandboxed-environment
Mostly phishing or link redirects. But the PDF in itself is harmless. Or Am I wrong here? Is it possible to install malware just by opening a PDF file?
My guess would be no… Because there isn’t any execution file to install sketchy binaries. This is very different from cracked games in the sense that getting malware from a PDF is more like a user mistake while a crack… You already know you are doing something sketchy and have no idea what it does in the background.
If someone has more details on how PDF can be exploited, except for the classical phishing attack (social engineering) I’m open to learn something new !
It is possible to run code directly inside PDF files, as can be seen with Doom or Linux running inside a PDF file https://github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf
In addition to that can PDF files prepared to trigger security weaknesses and exploits in PDF readers (often Acrobat Reader), to act as an attack vector and run malicious code.
So no, PDF are not safe by design.
The spec is fairly complex. Someone ported Doom to PDF, for what it’s worth.
That doesn’t make PDF an inherently dangerous filetype, but I’d say it increases the likelihood of bugs/zero days within the PDF viewer.
Every file can have zero days targeting a specific application though. Sure, PDF is a bit worse than other formats in that regard but I’d say the likelihood of a zero day PDF is approximately the same as a zero day MP4 for your video player.
i remember reading how some movies/shows came with a malicious lnk file that windows then picks up and gets infected
For the most part. Just dont download from sketchy sources
how do you know what source is sketchy?
Reputation.
well yeah, but where do you find reliable information about that? i know there is the megathread but that doesnt have every site listed on the good ones nor the ones to avoid.
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Just assume every public tracker is compromised.