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WINE: A New Place for KLEZ to Play?

An anonymous submitter sends in this cautionary tale about Wine being maybe a little too good at emulating Windows. Update: 10/23 21:05 GMT by M : Better links: mirror 1, mirror 2.

9 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Wine and / mounted as Z: ? by Havokmon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I swear when I read the article earlier today (It was posted on Desktoplinux and NewsForge already), that the guy said that by default, "/" was mounted a Z:.

    I've just recently done a wineinstall to clean out my wine settings, and I don't have a Z:. Does that happen if you're running as root?

    The only potential issue I can see is that your whole home directory is 'shared' between Linux and Wine by default.

    Maybe I just read ~/ as /

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  2. Old Story, Kinda by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There was a story a year ago about sircam running on Wine.

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  3. The good comes with the bad by sjbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Kinda obvious but easily forgotten. Being able to run windows apps is a two edged sword in many different respects. Access to good applications versus potentially reduced interest in linux development. Ability to run applications not built for linux versus inconsistant ability to run some of those same apps. And now of course, access to Windows apps versus the viruses that often go with them. The good comes along with the bad and there are plenty of unintended consequences to go around. Any engineer will tell you that there are tradeoffs for any design decision. WINE is no exception. Caveat emptor...

  4. Re:I'll say this only once... by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There was recently some discussion on the Wine newsgroup about limiting emulated applications' access to the system. This could be handy for dealing with semi-malware or just programs that don't fully like the emulated environment (and might need to be prevented from doing too many suspicious is-it-really-Windows checks). The reply was that since a Wine emulated program is running as an ordinary executable, it could call Unix system calls anyway, so there would be little point (from a strict security point of view).

    However, something like NetBSD's and OpenBSD's recently added feature to monitor system calls and define policies could potentially be very handy for running binary-only programs you don't fully trust: and of course most such programs are on the Windows platform.

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  5. Re:I'll say this only once... by alienw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As much as I hate to shatter your imaginary world, I have to say that NAV is a completely useless program designed to suck money out of your pocket. There are no more viruses on Windows than there are on Linux. What gets media attention are the Outlook scripting worms, and the only reason Linux can't get them is because it doesn't have Outlook. Run Outlook under wine, and you will get the same worms. It's not a fault of the OS, be it Linux+Wine or Windows, but a problem of the Outlook application.

  6. Re:It's not a Wine problem... by kasperd · · Score: 5, Interesting
    • How is KMail supposed to know if it is safe to "run" the attachment?
    • How is KMail supposed to know how to "run" the attachment?
    It is two different questions, but the answer is the same. You give KMail a list of filetypes, and tell it what to do with them. The list could contain a flag specifying dangerous filetypes. If that feature does not exist in KMail, the filetype should be ommited from the list.

    To me this sounds like a bug in the configuration rather than the software. And it does sound like a configuration mistake in the default install of this distribution.
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  7. Re:It's not a Wine problem... by gmarceau · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why did Wine accepted to run a file which didn't have +X permissions? That would be Wine's contribution to bugtrack.

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  8. Re:i would think by Sloppy · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Amusingly, this is sort of a case where the filesystem permissions failed. It sounds like this guy had WINE set up as a "viewer" for .EXE files, so KMail "viewed" the attachment with WINE. If you think about how this was probably implemented (speculating and analoquizing is so much more fun than actually looking up the answer ;-), then KMail probably wrote the attachment as a file somewhere under /tmp and without executable permission (both because it wouldn't make sense for KMail to +x it, and also maybe because of how the admin would probably mount /tmp). And then ran WINE with the temp file as argument.

    And WINE executed it anyway. Major blunder.

    Which just sort of goes to show, Unix's executable permission bit, is really mostly just "advisory" and not really enforced by kernel. (How could it?) Filesystem permissions, feh.

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  9. Detailed Klez Analysis by sheriff_p · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you want to know how exactly klez works, there's a very detailed analysis here:

    http://www.virusbtn.com/resources/viruses/indepth/ klez.xml

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