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Using WINE might give your linux system viruses?!?

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    Using WINE might give your linux system viruses?!?

    I wasn't sure where to post this. Have you guys seen this info?

    Using WINE might give you viruses?
    (This really disgusts me!)

    I wonder if the same thing can happen using vmware?
    I guess this means maybe I only need to run linux programs and no windows stuff?
    I really hate Micro$oft now!

    Viruses in Wine?
    http://wearenixed.blogspot.com/2008/...-seen-bad.html

    Someone pointed me to this thread.
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=72598

    "I had set her up with a perfect Wine install. She had a bit of software that needed to run under wine and I had shown her how to install within that environment. Apparently, I wasn't specific enough. It never occurred to Paula that the .exe programs she had used on her XP machine were the vehicles for many of her present viruses. To her, it was perfectly fine to use those same .exe's...after all, she was in Linux, right?

    I got there within the same hour and checked her machine. Yep...Windows viruses will reside and create the same havoc within a Wine environment. Now, I've seen it with my own eyes. This time I reinstalled for her and made sure I found all the infected .exe's on the Windows side and deleted them."

    There was then some interesting discussion on the mailing list about how to keep wine secure, about the interesting fact that viruses _should_ work in Wine. Its best for compatibility of Wine emulates as many of the bugs from Windows as possible. As far as security goes the verdict was that running Wine as a normal user for normal applications is fine. However if you are intentionally bench-testing something malicious a virtual machine is the safest route. Again, never run Wine as root!"



    #2
    Re: Using WINE might give your linux system viruses?!?

    Of course, Wine wouldn't be doing a good job if it couldn't run viruses, they are after all Windows programs.

    They will not infect your Linux stuff, though, although they might damage files that Wine has access to.

    VMWare (or the better alternative VirtualBox) can also house viruses, but these will not be able to reach your files in Linux, as they only see the virtual disk which is exposed to the virtual machine.

    If one is going to replicate an unsafe OS, the unsafeness comes with it.

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      #3
      Re: Using WINE might give your linux system viruses?!?

      I don't see a problem here, wine works as expected

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