The website for the popular VLC Media Player –videolan.org – is displaying a large warning in Bing results when users try to visit it. The warning states that the website may be dangerous and could lead to malware.
VLC Media Player is a well-known open source program that can play all kinds of video and audio codecs. According to Avast, VLC was the 7thmost -installed program in 2017.
The fact that Bing is displaying the notification in question was noticed yesterday, when the official VLC Twitter account tweeted about the issue.
Supposedly, @bing now considers vlc-3.0.4-win64.exe as a malware, which gives an annoying popup.
This appeared 2 days ago, and we have no clue how to fix it (yet).
We've checked, and the binary has not changed and is still correctly signed...
.
tbc…— VideoLAN (@videolan) November 27, 2018
Secnews did a test and indeed the notification still appears.
Uploading the Windows installation executable to VirusTotal ,the results show that only 1 out of 70 antiviruses detect anything malicious. However, running a re-scan of the executable (the previous scan was performed a few hours ago), no antivirus detects any malicious content.
VLC is popular among malware distributors
A common tactic used by many malware distributors is to take open source programs like VLC and embed adware extensions or trojans into them. This tactic has even been used by the CIA to spy on their targets.
Other popular applications that have been used in the past by the CIA include the following:
- IrfanView
- Chrome Portable
- Opera Portable
- Firefox Portable
- ClamWin Portable
- Kaspersky TDSS Killer Portable
- McAfee Stinger Portable
- Sophos Virus Removal
- Thunderbird Portable
- Opera Mail
- Foxit Reader
- LibreOffice Portable
- Prezi
- Babel Pad
- Notepad++
- Skype
- Iperius Backup
- Sandisk Secure Access
- U3 Software
- 2048
- LBreakout2
- 7-Zip Portable
- Portable Linux CMD Prompt
