Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
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Any media can contain exploits, for the most part if you stick to reputable uploaders you should do alright but it's essentially an unavoidable problem. Keep your media player up to date
It has to be executed to have any danger, so you'd need a zero day exploit for your media player, even then it should be contained at user level rather than system. I've not really heard of it happening, but it's theoretically possible I guess, would take a really bad coding mistake. Keep your players updated and you should be fine.
If it's for multimedia content, it's safe, I guess. I have been downloading movies and series from that page for 5 years, and I have never had any security problems.
Good to know! I know it's stupid and not at all the case, but I had read about a virus that ran on an old version of Windows when you open a file because Windows needed to compile the file to open it and the exploit took advantage of a vulnerability in that compiler to rescale to admin permissions, and I think about that when downloaded this serie.
You can hide malware in EXIF metadata.
Just let common sense and be always aware of abnormal device behavior.
There has also been a number of malwares targeted at codec decoders, VLC was at one time a big target, not sure that is true now a days though
There's no such thing as safe safe. While unlikely, even media/data files could contain exploits. They'd need to target specific issues in specific software, but that happens all the time.
WinRAR had a recent high publicity mistake earlier, where a "specially crafted" archive can make executables seem like other files so it's easy to accidentally run them. Big no.
I also recently saw an (old) exploit analysis: some Linux thing got wrecked specifically because of vulnerabilities in a media player/codec - in fact opening the folder was enough to trigger the exploit, which could give someone unrestricted access to your system. Very, very big no.
Back in the day, I think Windows Media Player had some idiotic license download thing that was also used as an attack vector.
Basically: executables are just a slam dunk malware delivery vector. Media files are safer in general but not safe.
Since it's a Linux box, you could try to sandbox your player with Firejail or a Flatpak + Flatseal. Just for a little bit of extra peace of mind.
The Pirate's Bay
I think you mean "The Pirate Bay"?
If you are a bit paranoid download it into a safe box and re-encode the file.