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.

[–] Wilker@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

Also for Linux: If you're paranoid about getting hit by a video-player exploit, I think you could thwart most attempts by throwing your player into firejail (maybe a properly configured flatpak could also do the trick?)

[–] EddyBot@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

oh there is a way without the user accessing it espcially on Windows: Anti virus scanner
since most of them scan all downloaded files a zero day exploit for these software might be automatically executed
bonus points: Anti virus software typically has system permissions too

(likelyhood is still hilariously low)

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

You made me think about it a little more, and there's one more thing, for the GUI based filemanagers of any operating system: thumbnail generation might also be able to be targeted