At the risk of asking an incredibly stupid question, but if I only ever torrent video/audio, scan everything I download with defender, and only ever use a recently updated version of vlc, what's the risk?

I remember getting viruses in ye olden days, but afaik the main problem is malware now.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago

This is about a game, which is a .exe. In your case, it's probably not an issue, but games will be. Pdfs also had an issue for a while, but I think that's solved. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any video/audio codec or VLC issues to be worried about though, so you should be good.

[–] TheQuantumPhysicist@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Movies and audio are very rarely infected, almost never. That depends on bugged software, so that you can be relatively safe of.

Executables... well... no anti virus can protect you in reality from dumb double-clicks. This is because viruses are trained against anti virus software until they can't be recognized. There are mathematically an infinite number of patterns to run a program to trick all kinds of anti viruses. So in reality you can't be safe. Once that's done by an expert virus creator, the best you have to protect you is a behavioral detection of viruses, which may or may not work.

So, don't rely on anti viruses. They barely protect you from script kiddies and legacy viruses.

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[–] p1mrx@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I haven't had the courage to run executable code from P2P networks since the early 2000s. Even then it was probably a bad idea.

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