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Is LibGen safe? I remember testing some of its mirror links on virustotal and saw some red flags, so I decided not to risk downloading.
by justarandomq 6y ago
Is LibGen safe? I remember testing some of its mirror links on virustotal and saw some red flags, so I decided not to risk downloading.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoYes it's just ebooks.
- mpfundstein 6y agoand scientific papers
- CamperBob2 6y agoEven an ordinary .PDF can have executable content. This isn't a baseless concern.
- mpfundstein 6y agowhat red flags did you see?
- justarandomq 6y agoIt was some book, and when submitting the download link, 3 of the antivirus results were red. Perhaps they were false positives.
- lucb1e 6y agoAnti-Virus tools have been flagging keygens and cracks for ages, and also hacking tools that grab passwords from (system) stores even if the tools have absolutely nothing in their code that talks to a server (I only ever used those for legal purposes, but can't tell you how often I had to disable an annoying AV...). Just because the AV says something is malware doesn't mean you can trust its claim. From my perspective, they've undermined their trustworthiness in the area where you are indeed most likely to rely on an AV. I'm not surprised they're now flagging what is basically text and images as malware.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- givepause 6y agoSome of your concerns are addressed in the wiki on freeread.org: http://freeread.org/reddit-libgen/ http://freeread.org/reddit-libgen/ VirusTotal includes some very poor quality Chinese AVs that produce positives for nearly every file. PDFs are pretty damn safe to access today -- the days of exploding macro exploits are about a decade behind us.