One of the reasons you might want to make sure your software is up to date is that some media players download subtitles automatically from several shared online repositories.

(…) Each of the media players found to be vulnerable to date has millions of users, and we believe other media players could be vulnerable to similar attacks as well. We estimate there are approximately 200 million video players and streamers that currently run the vulnerable software, making this one of the most widespread, easily accessed and zero-resistance vulnerability reported in recent years. By carefully crafting a subtitles file they claim to have managed to take complete control over any type of device using the affected players when they try to load a video and the respective subtitles.Īccording to the researchers, things look pretty grim: They found that VLC, Kodi (XBMC), Popcorn-Time and strem.io are all vulnerable to attack via malicious subtitle files.

CheckPoint researchers published in the company blog a warning about a vulnerability affecting several video players.

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