Researchers Found Chrome Bug Allowing Users to Download Netflix and Amazon Prime videos!
Media giants have been in a war against pirates for over a decade often shutting down platforms providing users with pirated content but there’s always a way around restrictions. This time, security researchers have discovered a bug in Chrome browser allowing anyone to download Netflix or Amazon Prime videos for free without any restrictions.
The bug was originally discovered by Alexandra Mikityuk of Telekom Innovation Laboratories and David Livshits of Ben-Gurion University. The researchers discovered viewers, while watching a video on Google Chrome, can easily save the Netflix or Amazon Prime video file on the device.
The bug basically exists in the Widevine EME/CDM technology owned by Google and used in Chrome browser allowing decoding and downloading of encrypted video streams. Widevine is currently used in more than 2 billion devices worldwide and is the same digital rights management technology used in Firefox and Opera browsers. However researchers did report the bug to Google about four weeks ago but didn’t receive any reply and that’s when they decided to make their findings public without revealing any technical details.
Watch the finding uploaded by researchers on YouTube:
Update:
Google has now released the following statement:
Wired“We appreciate the researchers’ report and we’re examining it closely. Chrome has long been an open-source project and developers have been able to create their own versions of the browser that, for example, may use a different CDM or include modified CDM rendering paths. The Chrome browser, however, is required to protect compressed video and does so.”
