when downloading movies, series and anime they mostly come in those formats. Can they contain virus? if yes, do they get detected with antivirus?
Sure. Whether they’re effective and actually able to execute is another question.
A simple way might simply be to put an actual executable in the file instead, and when a user double clicks to open it it’ll run instead. Or there’s stuff to hide in metadata that could exploit particular players, or even some OS preview systems, and get execution that way.
But……really pretty unlikely. Possible definitely, but you’d have to go through a lot of effort to get hit by something.
Hypothetically yes. But consider that much like a virus growing in a petri dish, it needs an appropriate environment. A mp4/mkv/whatever file sitting on your hard drive that you never access is not going to be problematic. Even when you do access it, it is probably is not going to do anything unless you also open it in the viewer that the malware author intended the payload for. There is no general purpose video decoding malware. They target the players.
as a reminder: in systems on Linux, remember to check the permissions of non executable files if you’re extracting them from a zip folder or similar, since those tends to preserve file permissions before you double-click them.
Absolutely. Hell, hackers have managed to hide complete documents into image files so when you open the file you see only a vacation foto, but using special software, they can remove the secret document.
for the most part, you’re safe; because media files aren’t executable (like exe, appimage, etc) including a virus in the file wouldn’t do much. there could be a zero-day (e.g buffer overflow in the media file that exploits a flaw in the player/decoder, but that isn’t anywhere near as common as including malware in executable files.
You Should never pirate movies, always buy them properly licensed.
