I wasn't sure where to post this. Have you guys seen this info?

Using WINE might give you viruses?
(This really disgusts me!)

I wonder if the same thing can happen using vmware?
I guess this means maybe I only need to run linux programs and no windows stuff?
I really hate Micro$oft now!

Viruses in Wine?
http://wearenixed.blogspot.com/2008/03/you-only-know-good-when-youve-seen-bad.html

Someone pointed me to this thread.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=72598


"I had set her up with a perfect Wine install. She had a bit of software that needed to run under wine and I had shown her how to install within that environment. Apparently, I wasn't specific enough. It never occurred to Paula that the .exe programs she had used on her XP machine were the vehicles for many of her present viruses. To her, it was perfectly fine to use those same .exe's...after all, she was in Linux, right?

I got there within the same hour and checked her machine. Yep...Windows viruses will reside and create the same havoc within a Wine environment. Now, I've seen it with my own eyes. This time I reinstalled for her and made sure I found all the infected .exe's on the Windows side and deleted them."

There was then some interesting discussion on the mailing list about how to keep wine secure, about the interesting fact that viruses _should_ work in Wine. Its best for compatibility of Wine emulates as many of the bugs from Windows as possible. As far as security goes the verdict was that running Wine as a normal user for normal applications is fine. However if you are intentionally bench-testing something malicious a virtual machine is the safest route. Again, never run Wine as root!"
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VMware should be better. Viruses, if any, will be on the virtual machine, not on the host.

Well no sh*t sherlock (and that's directed to the web link author not the author of the topic). If someone runs an .exe file with a virus in it, its going to run whether wine or XP. But wine doesn't run unless an application calls for it, and I don't believe a M$ based virus has the ability to install itself as background process in Linux via wine. My guess is the virus was only active when the .exe file was run. Of course I might be wrong there, I don't use wine extensively.

But any OS can have it's share of hacker/virus problems. I've seen people use passwords for root that are easily hacked into with a dictionary attack and next thing you know their machine is acting as a pirate ftp site and email relay server...this is just as bad as an M$ virus running as a background process.

thx for the replies guys.