As lot's of leaked databases are published here, one crucial question remains.
How can we check the archive or files contained in this one aren't infected. The simple act of unarchiving can infect a machine.
Tools like virus total can't scan large files.
How do you operate ?

Only download on virtual machine ?
Scan files by another way ?

First off, if simply unzipping an archive manages to infect your machine, you are doing something horribly wrong. Maybe you are thinking of zip bombs? :P

Don't execute strange programs (particularly cracked ones), and I'd advise against running ANY program you find on hacking forums unless the source code is available. Take caution, inspect file extensions. Enable that setting in Windows if you haven't already. Reading a .txt or .sql file cannot infect your machine.

(October 19, 2022, 11:15 PM)God Wrote: First off, if simply unzipping an archive manages to infect your machine, you are doing something horribly wrong. Maybe you are thinking of zip bombs? :P

Don't execute strange programs (particularly cracked ones), and I'd advise against running ANY program you find on hacking forums unless the source code is available. Take caution, inspect file extensions. Enable that setting in Windows if you haven't already. Reading a .txt or .sql file cannot infect your machine.

Archives such as zip can indeed contains malwares. So yes opening a leaked database as archive is succeptible to infect machine.
Even file contained in this archive. I downloaded a 24G leaked database, .txt file contains data but is also marked as executable.

Anyway, we shouldn't trust people sharing files. Especially on that kind of forums. So is there a way to check for virus by ourselves ?

While Zip bombs are a thing they are very rare and most of the time they only take up space/crash a system rather than installing malware.

If you want to be safe use a VM I would do this by default for any untrusted software or files unless you know exactly what your doing with them.

txt, sql, csv and other plain text files aren't an issue