wine virus story

[Edward Savage]

The assumption is that since win32 virus are so windows specific and
require so many small windows bugs and tweaks to run that they are a
good test bed to see how good windows compatibility really is.  In
general they are also rather badly written so finding linux-wine
compatibility issues should also be possible as well, we know they run
under windows so if they don't under wine then that is an issue that
should be looked at that could also fix other legit applications.

Besides I hardly think that is part of an image that doesn't already
exist or is even bad for the project.  When I've seen wine in the
media (a good number of times now) the comment has been, paraphrased,
'so good that it can even run some windows virus'.

I would suggest that the real media damage would come from any virus
running that we don't know about and then root kits or wipes some poor
newbies system.  I can see the slashdot headline now, "Users under
threat from unknown virus risks when using Wine".

I'm happy to just do this as a pet project and maybe report findings
for wwn or similar but in general I think it'd be some thing worth at
least keeping track of officially.

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Dmitry Timoshkov
<dmitry at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> "Edward Savage" <epssyis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Finally, where would be the right place to report the results? Appdb
>  > seems like a strange place to be putting results of this nature. :P
>
>  Since Windows viruses use Win32 APIs that's not surprising that they
>  work under Wine. What you are doing doesn't have IMO any practical means,
>  except probably hurting Wine by creating an image of Wine as a platform
>  for Windows viruses under Linux (which is not true).
>
>  --
>  Dmitry.
>