Ubuntu, Wine, and viruses

[Derek Broughton]

Peter N Spotts wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 12:01 +1000, James Takac wrote:
>> On Thursday 13 September 2007 11:48:34 Peter N Spotts wrote:
>> >
>> > I ran a virus scan today and found six infected files -- all, not
>> > surprisingly, attached to system files under wine. Just out of
>> > curiosity, how do viruses end up there? Such beauties as Win32:Parite
>> > and VBS:Malware. Wine doesn't run unless specifically invoked with a
>> > program, so even if I could open an *.exe file attached to an email, it
>> > wouldn't run. And I never run a browser or email client under wine; all
>> > are Linux based. The wine install itself came from Wine's website
>> > (debian package). Just curious...
>> >
>> 
>> Can think of 2 possibilities here
>> 
>> 1 - False positives
>> 2 - They were part of something you installed under wine
> 
> Many thanks...

I wonder ...  You don't actually have to "run" a browser in wine to "use" a
browser in wine - most of the apps I use actually require IE for some
functionality.  Still, modern Wine installs a gecko plugin, masquerading as
IE for those apps that won't just use the default browser, and it still
would surprise me if you picked up a virus that way.

fwiw, I have taken to creating a new wine prefix (wineprefixcreate --prefix)
for every app I install, so (a) if one ever does have virus, I know where
it came from; and (b) uninstalling is as simple as deleting ~/wine/APP
-- 
derek