Even the "unskilled attacker trying other people's vulns" threat basically depends on the existence of memory-safety related vulnerabilities.
What I can say is that parsing untrusted data in C is very risky. I can't say it is more risky than phishing for you, or more risky than anything else. I lack the context to do so.
That said, a really easy solution might be to just not do that. Just like... don't parse untrusted input in C. If that's hard for you, so be it, again I lack context. But that's my general advice - don't do it.