I understand that sharing video, photos, documents etc. is relatively safe because the data is not executed in the processor as instructions. How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though? How can one be confident that it does not contain malicious addons? Are people just don’t know the risks? Or are there protection mechanisms that I am missing? I mean since the software is usually cracked there is not much use in comparing checksums with the originals, is it?
“Updated” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Lots of people don’t keep their software up to date.
But yeah, the likelihood of any of us randomly happening upon 0days in the wild is pretty low.