Now Linux Can Get Viruses, Via Wine

fsufitch writes "Wine has advanced enough to make Linux not immune to Windows viruses. However, just like many Wine applications, it takes a bit of effort to get the program off the ground. Also, just like some Windows programs running via Wine, not all features may work — in this case, the crippling of the system, immunity to the task manager, identity theft, etc."

Comments

It's like a what?

[cjfs]

A virus run in Wine is akin to taking a ferocious tiger out of the jungle, paralyzing it, then hooking up all of its nerve endings to virtual jungle simulator. It's not a perfect simulation, though, so the jungle maybe doesn't look right, and plus there's an omnipotent power that can change anything that goes on in the simulation, or even destroy it and the tiger's consciousness with a few twitches of his fingers. Now that's power.

Power that's generated by feeding the dead tigers back to other tigers so we can use their body heat to generate MORE POWER!

On second thought, lets stick to car analogies.

Look to Apple users using VM

[Ilgaz]

If you look deeper to Apple users virtual machines (Sun Virtual Box etc.) , lots of them doesn't bother to install some free AV, a basic one saying "it is virtual anyway". When you talk about how evil things can be done while their virtual machine up and what kind of trouble they may get into if they have bad luck, they install a free AV to Windows.

If you have trouble convincing such people, just use plain logic: It can even run some games let alone a worm/trojan/virus.

It is not in the culture you know...

not just marketshare

[RiotingPacifist]

Ubuntu 9.10 will start sandboxing desktop programs (starts with xpdf i think), other distros do already/will follow. I think that sandboxing can (and if required will) criple malwares abilities (e.g can't listen on network ports, can't insert itself to bootsequence, can't touch chrome tabs that are connected to https sites) leaving them unable to do most malwarey things without permission and can work like an AV that is designed right (e.g warn users that they are about to do something very stupid, only when they are not everytime they run a 3rd party app/widget, without having to scan binaries)