Malware on Wine review

[Gert van den Berg]

Not sure exactly where in the thread this fits in, but here goes....

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:58 AM, Zachary Goldberg <zgold at bluesata.com> wrote:
> 2009/2/23 Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com>:
>> Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2009/02/23/running-windows-malware-in-linux/
>>>>
>>>> "Do not set the file association for Windows executables with Wine.
>>>> This would enable running Windows executables in Wine by simply double
>>>> clicking them."
>>>>
>>>> I saw a patch floating by to turn this on by default recently.  Maybe
>>>> we should make it off by default, but easy to turn on...?
>>>
>>> This would annoy all the people that the association targets. We can
>>> either make it easy to run all Windows apps (malware and legit) via
>>> file manager, or none at all.
>>
>> Yes, exactly.  The default should be off, and it should be easy to
>> turn on.
>> - Dan
>
> I disagree on this point.  Is malware via Wine on Linux really a
> problem commonly affecting users?  What happened to replicated
> Window's behavior bug for bug?  User X might ask: double clicking an
> exe works in Windows why shouldn't it in Linux?  Why should user X
> have to go through an extra step to do something on Linux than they
> would on Windows?
>

I posted my opinion on the matter on my blog. It basically says "Try
to make like XP SP2 for downloaded files, but do it for files on
drives marked as noexec as well"

http://blog.mohag.net/2009/02/sane-rules-for-determining-likely.html

Gert