funny wine virus article

[arinlares]

i've heard about viruses in Linux with Wine, but always thought they would be as bad in Windows. Apparently, this isn't true. I found a blog about a guy who tried to "be an active member of the Windows community" by trying to get several viruses running with Wine. apparently, the worst that happened is he had one of them consume resources, until he stopped wine. i won't ruin it for you, but it's a little funny.

Jad’s thoughts :Linux: Wine How- to | Running Windows viruses with Wine

edit: it is a bit dated, apparently.

[Freston]

By the way, as you can see here there are virii that run natively under Gnu/Linux.

[arinlares]

wow. is that actually to compile a virus? it takes as much work to get a virus in Linux as it does to prevent one in windows i don't know why one would want to, but it's rather interesting.

[JeffNetSite]

yah that is why there are lots of antivirus company making version for linux

[kakariko81280]

Linux is improving in a lot of areas, including virus support. I remember an article about Kaspersky warning about Virus.Linux.Bi.a/Virus.Win32.Bi.a, a virus capable of infecting windows and Linux boxes. Sadly the reviewer discovered it didn't work on his version of Linux due to its hand written assembly tripping an obscure bug.

However the power of open source is not so easily defeated and some discussion with the kernel developers resulted in a patch to permit the virus to run.

With dedication I'm sure we can get things to a state where even relative newcomers can configure their systems for easy virus installation, but I suspect out-of-the-box support will always lag far, far behind.



Chris...

[arinlares]

thar patch isn't widely distributed, is it? it's interesting as a study, but could be bad as an implemented feature. and, yes, i know my question is quite stupid, but i think i'm misreading the linux.com article.

[kakariko81280]

I don't see why that patch wouldn't be mainline, there was a genuine bug that was properly fixed. The way to read it isn't "We patched the kernel to make a virus work," but rather "This program, which happens to be a virus, uncovered a bug so we fixed that bug."

The virus shouldn't fail because of a kernel/gcc bug. It should, and does, fail because it can't propagate beyond the security features built into Linux. Linus even refers to it as "your virus thing." which sounds like he considers it more a toy than a serious threat to anyone.

There's even a virus writing howto which covers, with code samples, how to write a virus from scratch, but it also covers detecting and defeating the attacks. Being frank about how they work deprives viruses of their fear inducing mystery and equips people to defend themselves more effectively.

Don't worry about asking apparently silly questions. You writing it probably means a dozen folk are thinking it so it's better you ask and we can set everyone straight.

Chris...

[arinlares]

i see now. the kernel bug kept the virus from working, which led to its discovery. odd how that works.

[elija]

Does that mean that the virus now works?

[arinlares]

it functions better, anyway. that article is a couple of years old. i doubt it's active, or even existent, in the wild. i AM a newbie to the linux world, though. it could have came and went for all i know.