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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I mean, that's how people get hacked. If vlc crashed on my computer, and every day I should raise thanks to my gods that I do not use vlc, I would immediately unplug it and thoughtfully consider the circumstances under which it would be safe to turn it back on.

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Do you feel the same way about seeing "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" in the terminal from some other arbitrary program?

If not, why not?

Because people often use VLC to view untrusted content.

Video is a great vector for distributing malware, especially sought-after grey area content like porn, conflict videos, celebrity leaks, pirated films, etc. Not enough people pay attention to the impact of video as a vector for compromise. All downloaded video should be sandboxed!

How many victims are known to be exploited by video codecs? Compare that with the wider landscape of how victims are being exploited.

Codec vulnerabilities in the browser have been a recurring source of exploits, as have similar vulnerabilities in phone messenger apps. The phone ones are particularly bad because phones typically preprocess received media files (for thumbnailing etc) so a vulnerability here can sometimes be chained into a remotely triggered near-instant compromise.

I don’t know if there is data on exploits due to downloaded media but it would be an easy way to exploit specific target populations (find a video of interest to them and “leak” it somewhere).

If said videos or media are doing that, there would be a corpus of samples by now. I'm very sceptical of this.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but I concede that attacks via locally downloaded video may not be a widespread problem at the moment. The problem is we just don’t know. I doubt these attacks would be effective against government or corporate targets (not sure who is torrenting on their work computer) and that’s where most post-exploit forensic data is gathered.

Right, this is why video parse / decode ought to be sandboxed. Writing secure code for these formats, especially in C, is really hard. I just sort of glanced at the bug in the repo, but it sounds plausible. It certainly wouldn’t be the first of its kind.

And it's my impression the code is often in assembly, which is even less structured.

>I mean, that's how people get hacked. If vlc crashed on my computer, and every day I should raise thanks to my gods that I do not use vlc, I would immediately unplug it and thoughtfully consider the circumstances under which it would be safe to turn it back on.

What are you doing on your computer where it is really a threat to you? I'm curious as to your specific use case :)

> I mean, that's how people get hacked.

...when was the last documented case of an in-the-wild hack targeting VNC?

I'm guessing none to be honest. It sounds plausible but in practice it's probably too difficult to do anything useful compared to other tried and true vectors.

Everyone goes to the extremes when it comes to these theories and throws out all aspects of pragmatism.

VLC != VNC

Oops! I was on my phone. I meant VLC.

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