BleepingComputer.com: Can movie files be infected?

Is it possible at all for a virus to infect a movie file and use it as a vehicle for transferring viruses? In what capacity would this be possible?

Also, say you had a virus that was on your PC and somehow infected a video file, you then upload that video to say, Youtube, and then re-download the MP4 from Youtube. Would you be infected with the virus?

This is all hypothetical of course... unless, they can in fact be infected??

Thanks for your help

As far as I know, it IS possible for movie files to be infected, although it may not be very common, but uploading it to Youtube would not result in an infected .mp4 file.

But how does that work exactly? What are the specifics of it and how would you go about having an infected movie in the first place? And why would an infected movie be cleansed if it was uploaded and then re-downloaded as an MP4?

Youtube doesn't just take the file you upload and post THAT on their site
They encode/convert it and what-not. Then THAT is what you actually watch, which is why videos lose their quality after being uploaded. If their videos could be infected, imagine how much malware would be spread by it.

Here's a little read about how exactly they become infected. The article is a bit dated (2008), but as far as I know, the methods remain similar. I am by no means an expert, but I gather a bit of info from lurking the forums (I've been active here since 2008, this is a new account)

This post has been edited by Sightless: 20 September 2010 - 03:57 PM