Published by exdone
Posted on May 24, 2017
Perpetrators use various methods, also referred to as ‘attack vectors’, to deliver cyberattacks. These attack vectors can be divided into two major categories: Either the attacker persuades the user to visit a malicious website, or he tricks him into running a malicious file on his computer.
Our research reveals a new possible attack vector, using a completely overlooked technique in which the cyberattack is delivered when movie subtitles are loaded by the user’s media player. These subtitles repositories are, in practice, treated as a trusted source by the user or media player; our research also reveals that those repositories can be manipulated and be made to award the attacker’s malicious subtitles a high score, which results in those specific subtitles being served to the user. This method requires little or no deliberate action on the part of the user, making it all the more dangerous.
Unlike traditional attack vectors, which security firms and users are widely aware of, movie subtitles are perceived as nothing more than benign text files. This means users, Anti-Virus software, and other security solutions vet them without trying to assess their real nature, leaving millions of users exposed to this risk. Read more
Kodi Team Response
You may have read in the news that malicious subtitle zip files could potentially infect and harm your media player including Kodi. When Check Point researchers uncovered this flaw they contacted us up front to let us know about this flaw. Our developers fixed this secuity gap and have added the fix to this v17.2 release. As such we highly encourage all users to install this latest version! Any previous Kodi version will not get any security patch. We have began the roll out of this version and Android Play Store as well as Windows Store have this update pending and will roll out as soon as possible. Please be patient if you are using these store versions. Our official download page of course has the regular install files available for the supported platforms. Read more
How to force update kodi on the Fire stick