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.
images from Hacker News
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