One Piece fan and happy to fly the Mugiwara jolly roger.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • payloads hidden in MP4 metadata

    interesting. i wasn’t aware that was a thing.

    any clue how that works? like if it targets specific video players like vlc or something?

    in my head, i was just thinking that if that was the case, then on linux it might make sense for me to start using flatpak version of vlc (or use bwrap/firejail container on it).


    edit: for anyone else interested in this, there are apparently a bunch of articles about it online. here’s one if you’re too lazy to look for yourself:

    https://cloudmersive.com/article/How-Malicious-MP4-Files-Threaten-Security-and-Reputation

    from the several articles I skimmed, it seems like it is more common to embed a batch or powershell script and target windows users, so being on Linux might help in terms of not being in the primary target demographic. But there was mention of buffer overflow techniques and such so it sounds like it really is kind of random.

    And sometimes its not even technically malware but basically steganography. like the article mentioned this:

    Finally, the possibility of hidden NSFW content (including CSAM and other extremely sinister illegal media) within video files can’t be ignored.

    That last part would actually bother me a LOT more than some windows-specific malware on my non-windows systems. I might have to start running my pirated media thru ffmpeg / etc and having it remove any metadata I don’t specifically whitelist by field and data type… at least for the stuff that doesnt come from well known release groups on popular sites.

    appreciate you calling this out, PabloSexcrowbar



  • I run Linux myself but even on windows… if you have qbittorrent 5.1.2+ (not sure in earlier versions; had to open an old vm image to confirm it went back this far)

    then anyone who only pirates videos/music could just set qbittorrent > downloads > excluded file names to have *.exe on one of the lines and avoid this easily.

    people who do pirate games/software could probably still add something like these to the same setting without disrupting their game/sw dls and still avoid 90+% of these kind of attacks:

    *.avi.exe
    *.mp3.exe
    *.mp4.exe
    *.mkv.exe
    *dvdrip*.exe
    *webrip*.exe
    *web.dl*.exe
    *web-dl*.exe
    *bluray*.exe
    *1080p*.exe
    *720p*.exe
    *480p*.exe
    *x264*.exe
    *x265*.exe
    *hvec*.exe
    *av1*.exe
    *imax*.exe
    *aac5.1*.exe
    *hdtv*.exe
    *amzn*.exe
    *hulu*.exe
    *yify*.exe
    *yts*.exe
    *eztv*.exe
    

    only spot it might need some fine tuning that i can think of is if you have the occasional fitgirl pack that has optional stuff for 720 vs 1080 videos as a selective download… and you should really be looking at those when you download anyway