What would happen if you ran a windows virus using Wine?

[Jengu]

This one of the reasons I feel that using wine is a bad idea.

This doesn't mean that using wine is a bad idea. Precautions could be taken to jail the wine installation. For example, the wine package could be changed so that it created a new user, and all wine apps were run by that user, so that your windows apps wouldn't have permission to mess with your files specifically. People have talked about this on the wine mailing list before.

ANY Linux program could be trashing your home folder the same way a virus run under wine does, it's just that people tend to develop more data trashing programs for windows

Note that running the virus under wine is still more secure than windows -- it can only trash the things you as a user have permission to trash, so the most it can muck up is your home folder.

[Glenn1337]

interesting topic... i'd like to see what the do to windows itself

[yaknowwat]

Anyway you look at it running virus's under wine isn't very dangerous.
If a main dll somehow manages to be destroyed you can reinstall wine. without any major problem.

even if a keylogger can be run on wine after a restart its basically dead as it can't place itself to run on start so, the most damage a virus can do is its first run other than that it'd be dead.

virus's targets would normaly be in the main c: drive though.

z: drive if your worried that much since its the default you can alter it.
it'd be suggested running certain things in seperate false drives for wine. important things in their own drive with a funny starting name after the fake dosdevices shortcut I.E. ( J:\1a2b3c\ ) like what virus would target that.

[MetalheadGautham]

woweeee windows viruses in wine !
I guess this means an infected game disc can cause havoc in wine...

[Christmas]

The only thing that happened to me when I ran some obscure EXEs was that they created a lot of files with names like 'BF1942CRACK.exe' in some random directory in my home directory. Whatever virus you get, it can mess you .wine directory so if you want to get rid of them just delete it and start over with winecfg and installing whatever apps you need.

[bodhi.zazen]

woweeee windows viruses in wine !
I guess this means an infected game disc can cause havoc in wine...

Well, as I have pointed out many times, that is simply not true. Even though you may be running wine, you are still running Linux. Security is actively built into wine and viruses either do not run, or if they have "potential" the code has been patched.

http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?s...30222&from=rss

Please note, in order to run viruses one has to first configure wine to allow them to try to run. Even with these configurations, they run poorly, if at all (most will not do anything at all).

So yes, it is possible to configure your system to run viruses, but you the users would need to manually configure wine to allow this.

And tell me, why would your game disk have a virus? Please tell me your are not pirating software.

[Bungo Pony]

And tell me, why would your game disk have a virus? Please tell me your are not pirating software.

Possibly the same reason these ones had a virus:

http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/cih.shtml

and let's not forget about the mess Sony made.

[borris.morris]

Yeah, curse sony!

[phrostbyte]

If you only let Wine to access the fake C: drive the damage a virus can do, even a really bad one, ends at messing up your Wine installation.

apt-get --purge remove wine
apt-get install wine

Note that Wine has much more access by default. This is unfortunately needed for inter operating with Linux files.

[jakupl]

I wonder what would happen if someone ran a virus using wine as root, with / mounted as a drive in wine. I have a free partition.... I'm tempted to try. Of course not mounting any other drives so it doesn't spread outside too far.

stop giving me ideas I'm actually thinking of reinstalling ubuntu... I kinda messed it up allready.
???????
Let me think for a while