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Running Windows Viruses Under Linux
ResQuad writes "Everyone loves Windows viruses, right? Well, the crazy people over at NewsForge (owned by the same people that own Slashdot) decided to try running Windows viruses with Wine. So next time you receive an email virus, strike up Wine and see what you can do (or not)."
Will this run on a Lexus?
Lets see just how non emulator wine is... If the virii own it, its an emulator, if not, its telling the truth.
Bwhahahh...
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
Oh my god, how many times do we have to say it? People, running Windows software under WINE is not a solution. I say all Slashdotters should boycott these software vendors until we get a serious commitment from them to do true, native Linux ports of their products.
And for that matter, why aren't their open source alternatives to this software already? The open source community won't stay competitive by resting on its laurels.
Breakfast served all day!
Brilliant work guys!
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Programmers these days, don't they even CARE about cross-platform compatability!?
True AV and AT (anti-trojan) SW engineers uses VMWARE for their studies and dissemination of malacious flotsam of codes floating around the internet.
But the article is "A Good Thing" because it shows EITHER that Wine isn't 100% Microcrap or is more robust against viruses.
Take your pick.
The point being its not a zip file to begin with. its simply disguised as one.
I have accepted Provolone into my life!
Its nice to see someone finally exploited this long missing aspect of linux. What better way to make a windozer user feel more at home than with their old virus friends.
Nice article, and congrats matt on your first article.
-Craig
Lovgate simply exited without doing anything. Mydoom actually crashed WINE into its debugger. The Netsky variant, as the article describes (SomeFool is Netsky) actually ran. Moreover, it did a passel of DNS queries and actually tried to send e-mail (which was rejected). So, if that e-mail had been accepted, Netsky would have been able to propagate under WINE. As in the article, Ctrl-C proved necessary and effective.
To make a long story short, yes, some Windows viruses do run under WINE. Of course, you have to tell WINE to run them -- not exactly the social engineering that viruses are intended to do. However, as WINE gets more popular and reliable, I would expect that this will be more of a problem for people who choose to (e.g.) run Outlook in WINE.
(For what it's worth, WINE isn't the only way to run Windows viruses and worms on your non-Windows system. I've had to explain to users that yes, their VMware or Virtual PC system is quite capable of getting wormed, and that yes, they did need to do their Windows Update on that "virtual" Windows system, too.)
Solitare. It's the only game I care about.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The wine developers get a non-compliance notice from Bill forcing them to comply??
Now, how can you claim full compliance unless you run my viruses too..goddamn it!!
Rapid Nirvana
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I run Windows spyware under Wine. I also emulate IE6 so I can use CoolWebSearch and other cool searchbars! I have this cute Bonzi Buddy and a system tray icon which tells me the weather!
...to stop Wine-ing
Geeze!
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
It's simple. A lot of specialty software is very boring, and there just isn't any interest in the OSS community in developing similar software.
Many businesses, especially real estate, banking, auto repair, fast food, and hotel management, rely on software written for windows many years ago that, for them, functions just fine.
They're not techies: computers are not their business. Their business is their business. They're not going to invest resources in developing what they already have just so it can run on "another kind of computer." WINE is the perfect solution for these applications.
Maybe, years from now, when they're running -ALL- of their software under WINE, they might realize that there's a better way.
Until then, good luck finding good programmers who are psyched to write hotel reservation management software that will interface an archaic database platform for free.
Projects like Open Office and The GIMP don't suffer from this problem largely because they're applications that Linux users need on a regular basis. When was the last time you needed to track your fast food orders?
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
What would RMS say?
Is that virus Free Software?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
When a zip file on Linux is not a zip file, you get an error.
When a zip file on Windows is not a zip file, you get some system enhancemnets you may not have wished for (or would even wish on your worst enemy).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Running Microsoft programs is the hardest for Wine because they use secret function calls. The Virus writers (presumably) aren't insiders so don't know about the secret APIs. Should be easy for Wine.
a couple years old? I'm sure I've seen it before, and I'm pretty sure it was on slashdot.
Linux kernel now supports foriegn binaries. IIRC, some patches are available to enable support for PE binaries (Windows native binaries). If dependencies are kept low, with some clever programming, virii that run on multiple platforms are possible without something like wine or java.
That's the point. What a pity, there are tenths of replacements on Linux for almost all user activities, but there isn't even one linux-compatible virus project on sourceforge!
Though it's good to know that WINE will do what it's supposed to do--execute code written for Windows, it's kinda silly to think it wouldn't.
/ to see what happens!"
Maybe they'll post a story about, "Why do dumb users get to have all the fun? Why shouldn't Linux admins get in on all the insanity, too? Today we'll be doing rm -rf
Let's not go to Camelot. 'Tis a silly place..."
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Solitare. It's the only game I care about.
...but obviously not enough to spell it correctly.
This article ran fine under firefox and delivered interesting content. The methodology was fundimentally flawed as viruses use obscure problems in Windows. Nevertheless, I'll give this article four meta-penguins, for a score of 4/5.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I can believe all the people complaining that this is a waste of time. Don't you know how much FUN viruses can be?
Take Magistr: I'd spend HOURS chasing my icons all over the desktop. Or what about the one that would crash my system every time I shot a rocket into a wall in Quake 2 (I'm not joking, I really had one that did this)?
Come on, this is quality entertainment!
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
Right before Y2K, there was a worm/virus/whatever called Happy99.exe. If you secured your wine installation prior execution, you could watch the pretty fireworks it produced without harming your installation.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
From the article:
Oh sure, I could manually forward these viruses to the folks in my address book, but where's the fun in that?
This reminds me of the old standby text-based, system agnostic viruses, some of which can be seen here.
That green slime had it coming.
At the last WineConf (almost exactly one year ago) some of the Wine developers were testing the hot mail virus of the day to make sure it ran. That was the one that activated as a DDoS on www.sco.com. It ran, and after putting making www.sco.com resolve to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts it attempted to take down the local machine.
We also found the back door, and came close to getting arbitrary programs to run from it, but supper came before we got that part working. We think it would have worked if a free meal hadn't gotten in the way.
So now you know. If a windows virus doesn't run under wine you can thank CodeWeavers for buying everyone a meal before we got it implimented.
Whine is Hazardous, even If Not and Emulator
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So, if WINE fails to properly run a Windows virus under Linux, is it considered a bug or a feature?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You know, some dimwit is going to read this thread and/or the article and go running to his boss saying, "See? SEE?! Linux has Windows viruses too!"
Just you wait and see....
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
Obviously work is still needed on Wine to make it more Windows compatible :-)
Yup, I run VPC on my Mac; I *only* fire it up to double-check website code on IE for compatibility, then shut it down again. Don't do ANYTHING else with it.
Today, out of curiousity, I installed AdAware and ran it through. Sure enough, at least 19 spyware doo-dads scattered around.
Jeeezus...I know I'm biased as a Mac guy, but Windows has truly become COMPLETELY toxic at this point; it's like plutonium, infecting *anything* that it comes near.
Hello, fellow Slashdotters,
I use Microsoft Windows XP, Professional Edition, Service Pack 2; yet my computer is missing the viruses mentioned in this article. Where did I go wrong? My Web browser is Mozilla Firefox 1.0, and my e-mail client is Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0. Should I change these? Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 SP-2 is resident on my computer for testing my websites in this popular program. Should I browse more freely with it? I prefer to use open-source-licensed software on my computer when possible (except the OS itself, although I do have an underutilized Debian partition). Should I start downloading random programs without being sure they do not contain any kind of malware?
I just want to get along better with my fellow Windows users! Please, help!
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
I suspect I may have a virus on my Linux system. The other day I switched the computer on, and it took a very long time to boot - and kept spewing out all this cryptic text as it did. After I logged in, I noticed that my desktop menu had a lot of strange, poorly documented programs in it, some of which didn't seem to do anything useful. The configuration system was strangely flakey, popping up tabbed windows that wouldn't go away when I clicked on other options. Various programs worked partially, but in some of them the clipboard didn't work properly and in others the windows widgets and controls looked wrong. A few would randomly open shell windows when I tried running them, even though they were GUI programs. The windows theming/skinning system worked partially, at best. I tried running a graphics program, but it just opened up lots of windows all over the screen and I couldn't get it to do anything reasonable, so I gave up. I suspect it was the cause of the virus infection, in fact, because it was called some insulting and childish name that had nothing to do with Graphics or Image Manipulation Programs or anything else. Oh, and there's this picture that shows up everywhere, of some kind of anatomically improbable cartoon bird with an eating disorder, which is either a symptom of virus infection or else a failed attempt at coordinated branding by a lot of uncoordinated programmers.
In general, my Linux system seems to be totally hosed. I think I'll go back to Windows.
I have discovered a truly remarkable
When a zip file on Windows is not a zip file, you get some system enhancemnets you may not have wished for (or would even wish on your worst enemy).
Uhhh... no. File associations are based on extensions. It's probable that you've forgotten to turn off the Explorer "feature" of hiding extensions for known filetypes. This way, you get sexygirls.jpg.exe which appears as sexygirls.jpg, or xxx.zip.scr which appears as xxx.zip. Most people are ignorant enough to leave that "feature" enabled as per Microsoft's negligent default; furthermore, most users who are pseudo-capable with computers will click on it with the flawed reasoning that, "Well, it's a JPEG, so it can't be a virus".
Furthermore, years ago I ranted on my website that it was *very* possible to run Windows e-mail viruses, etc. under Wine. So easy that, with Red Hat 7.2's default associations which launch Wine to run DOS/Windows apps, I accidentally infected my Wine directory while demonstrating Linux freedom from virii... "Moving right along, you can see how well Linux can emulate Windows well enough to run many programs..."
Fire and Meat. Yummy.