PRESS: run windows viruses with wine ...

[Mike Hearn]

On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 13:45 -0800, Hiji wrote:
> That said, the JDS does a lot of stuff for you.  By
> default, it automounts windows partitions so basically
> anyone can write to them (root or not).  In this case,
> with this specific distro, a virus would have write
> access to that partition.  I don't mount anything, the
> distro does...

Yeah, but there's no point in exaggerating this. Is it a technical
possibility with some setups? Yes. Have I ever heard of it happening?
No.

The biggest potential entrypoint for viruses in Wine is probably
Internet Explorer. People who use that should know the risks involved,
and it's massively unlikely anybody would use IE as their default
browser on Linux. 

While you can run a few other viruses if you explicitly try:

a) Why would you do that?

b) Very few viruses these days scan your entire hard disk looking
   for binaries to infect, in fact very few do polymorphic infection
   at all. That's very old fashioned. These days they just dump
   themselves in c:\windows\system and start blatting other machines
   with bad packets (or they go and say hi to their master)

My original email was to correct a slight factual inaccuracy in the
text, not to get anybody worried. The chances of this actually being a
problem are so close to zero that it's not worth thinking about.

thanks -mike