Beware! Playing Untrusted Videos On VLC Player Could Hack Your Computer

[The AchieVer]

Beware! Playing Untrusted Videos On VLC Player Could Hack Your Computer

 

 

 

If you use VLC media player on your computer and haven't updated it recently, don't you even dare to play any untrusted, randomly downloaded video file on it.

Doing so could allow hackers to remotely take full control over your computer system.

That's because VLC media player software versions prior to 3.0.7 contain two high-risk security vulnerabilities, besides many other medium- and low-severity security flaws, that could potentially lead to arbitrary code execution attacks.

With more than 3 billion downloads, VLC is a hugely popular open-source media player software that is currently being used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide on all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, as well as Android and iOS mobile platforms.

Discovered by Symeon Paraschoudis from Pen Test Partners and identified as CVE-2019-12874, the first high-severity vulnerability is a double-free issue which resides in "zlib_decompress_extra" function of VideoLAN VLC player and gets triggered when it parses a malformed MKV file type within the Matroska demuxer.

The second high-risk flaw, identified as CVE-2019-5439 and discovered by another researcher, is a read-buffer overflow issue that resides in "ReadFrame" function and can be triggered using a malformed AVI video file.

 

Though the proof-of-concepts demonstrated by both researchers cause a crash, a potential attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to achieve arbitrary code execution with the same privileges as of the target user on the system.

All the attacker needs to do is craft a malicious MKV or AVI video file and trick users into playing it using the vulnerable versions of VLC.

Well, that's not a tough job, as attackers can easily target hundreds of thousands of users within hours by simply releasing malicious video files on torrent sites, mimicking as a pirated copy of a newly released movie or TV series.

According to an advisory released by VideoLAN, having ASLR and DEP protections enabled on the system could help users mitigate the threat, but developers did admit that these protections could be bypassed too.

Paraschoudis used honggfuzz fuzzing tool to discover this issue and four other bugs, which were also patched by the VideoLAN team earlier this month along with 28 other bugs reported by other security researchers through EU-FOSSA bug bounty program.

Users are highly recommended to update their media player software to VLC 3.0.7 or later versions and should avoid opening or playing video files from untrusted third parties.

 

 

Source

[steven36]

This one way people  on Linux will get a new version 

 

I don't really like the player myself  if you use Ubuntu Snap version   it got  automatically  updated to 3.07  Always the native versions in Linux are behind only way they push out and update is security bugs like these  or if you install a major distro update . VLC don't  build versions for Linux so you have to build them yourself or get them  from the  official distro channels and they hardly get updates  or unofficial ppa like this one witch only have them for Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS  witch updates fast.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/vlc-3 
sudo apt-get update

https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+archive/ubuntu/vlc-3/+packages

 

Back in 2015  VLC had a bad security bug  just like this  in it  before ,

 

VLC Media Player MKV File Parsing Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/threat-encyclopedia/vulnerability/2063/vlc-media-player-mkv-file-parsing-remote-code-execution-vulnerability

 

But installing 3.07  want fix  other issues the player itself is buggy as crap if you watch x265  ,its bloatware with hardly any settings,  there development is almost non existent 4.0 dev has been out forever

 

Why I Swapped VLC for MPV updated Updated 24 January 2019

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/swap-vlc-mpv-ubuntu

 

While MPV  itself is mostly command line (CLi) features you can use a front-end like SMPlayer with it and it will be loaded down with them , A old version of MPV  is a 100 times better from Linux  official channels  than the newest versions of VLC  because MPV has way less bugs .

 

And you can get updates faster for it using Doug McMahon's ppa on Ubuntu

https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/ubuntu/mpv-tests

 

Ubuntu Budgie  the most newest flavor  of Ubuntu i been using  for last 2 years is rock sold stable  don't come with VLC  it come with Gnome MPV  witch is another front end for MPV , so it uses MPV as a default ,

 

It seems to me most people that use VLC  for there default are just using  it because of the name because in all the years i watched videos on Windows  and then on Linux I never liked it! Only one thing that's OK about it it can be tweaked to stream iptv  but Kodi can do the same thing if you add a  m3u to it.