There was a time when people relied on Microsoft Windows Media Player to play videos and DVDs on their computers. Often Microsoft Windows Media Player could not play a particular video file and then people had to install the respective codecs to play that file. This is why codec packs like K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, Windows Codec Pack and Oneplay Codec Pack became popular with Windows users. But pretty soon everyone stopped using Microsoft Windows Media Player and switched to VideoLAN VLC Media Player because it has a very small memory footprint and did not require any external codecs to be installed.
Over the past several years, VLC Media Player has effectively replaced all the other media player software at least for Windows and Linux users. And this makes it even more serious that the security researchers have discovered a security risk in the version 3.0.1 and earlier versions of VLC Media Player.
According to the security advisory published by VideoLAN, this vulnerability can be used to either crash the VLC media player or to gain the same privileges as the target user. For this, a user has to open a specially crafted malicious SWF file in the VLC player. You can read more details about the vulnerability at https://www.videolan.org/security/sa1801.html.
One way to patch your VLC player is to update it to the latest version which at this moment is version 3.0.3. Once the VLC player is updated, you are well protected from this security risk. You can download the latest version of the VLC Media Player from https://www.videolan.org/vlc/.
But even after the update, it is a good idea to follow the advice given by VLC player developers and avoid opening files from untrusted third parties or accessing untrusted remote sites. Alternatively, you can also disable all the VLC browser plugins.