This makes me miss r/shittyreactiongifs
Here’s a careful reminder that Linux viruses can come in Windows executables.
When it comes to hacking in the modern day it’s all about escaping the box - whether that box is a container, a VM, a sandbox or indeed even an emulated environment. So we should still fear the binary blob.
Remember: update early, update often - no matter how painful that sounds.
Compatibility layer. Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Which is what makes the situation much worse
Remember: update early, update often - no matter how painful that sounds.
Not anymore! Supply chain attacks have become so common that it’s prudent to wait at least 7 days before updating to prevent installing malware from compromised update infrastructure.
So, what’s the solution? Debian Stable?
Debian + unattended upgrades + modern package managers for non-system-installed software covers your bases very well.
Debian packages are downstream enough from their sources that the packaging delay keeps you safe (and means the updates have had human eyes on them before they hit you). Unattended upgrades means you don’t have to worry about running the upgrades yourself.
Pip, npm, and the other big package managers now also support dependency cooldowns on their recent releases, but uv and pnpm pioneered that and cover you for older release environments.
Also I would heavily advocate for Debian Testing if you need a rolling release distro. It is less vetted than stable but is still more vetted than many other rolling release options and you can just stay on testing as versions change while getting features pretty fast compared to stable.
N-1
I really like Arch because I have a very custom setup and like to try the newest things, but this really worries me as Arch-based user-friendly distros that use the same packages make the repos a bigger target.
On the other hand, AI has made the patch to exploit code as short as 45 minutes.
What if you use for example ubuntu and wait 3 years?
I switched from Debian to an arch based distro. holy shit is it weird reading about some new things latest release only to have it pushed to the repo the same month or even the same day! I use btrfs so when things break its a 5 minute rollback and reboot.
You’d still be fine if you’re not exposing public services or visiting actively-malicious websites.
You are underestimating things. Unmalicious websites can still host malicious content by users, for example.
Okay, wanna give me a link to a PoC example you set up?
I’ll reimage my laptop to an old Ubuntu ISO of your choice, and visit your link. Happy to be proven wrong.
No, I will not spend hours of my time to win an irrelevant internet argument. :P
Fair enough!
But I can tell you as a cybersecurity expert that you’d have a hard time finding a way to get any sort of remote execution from user-generated content on any major site, much less an exploitable browser sandbox escape.
I read a hilarious article, probably 2 decades ago by now, where a guy decided to try running Windows viruses on Linux in Wine.
If this really is a threat today, I would say that Wine has become a pretty damn impressive project. Here’s the link in case anyone else wants to read it: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/05/01/26/219201/running-windows-viruses-under-linux
There’s never been an instance of widespread malware built with a dedicated ability to persist on a Linux host through Wine.
It wouldn’t be hard at all for a hacker to manually wire up linux-specific malware on a computer once they had a RAT running in Wine, but there’s no credible risk of windows malware automatically installing “linux viruses” at present.
Jokes on them, even when I ran windows my os wasn’t on C, I think it was like E
kinky.
Isn’t your user data available in Wine on Z:\ though? I laughed at the meme but I’d still be worried info stealer malware or similar would have no problem grabbing the data it’s looking for as Wine does no sandboxing at all.
you can remove the Z drive letter, but that’s not enough. Nothing prevents a windows program from attempting to call linux syscalls
Yeah, I’m sure some malware would fail on wine but some could still be just as bad compared to running windows natively.
Proton for some reason insists in mounting root on Z. Plain wine doesn’t care. So I had to use firejail.
“Okay i’il look in to other drives”
Wine is a flatpak
yea, I play pirated games via flatpak bottles in hopes that getting out of the sandbox would be far too much work for the possible gains.
That sounds perfectly reasonable.
Hmmmmmm, maybe the virus shouldn’t use GTK dialogs for opening files and call open(3)? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I don’t get what you mean
Type
man 3 open.That’s what most Flatpak apps may do instead of asking permission via a fancy menu, which actually just does the same thing.
This is pure gold
Meanwhile innocent looking Z:/ drive
runs wine as root yolo
Yeah, Wine is not a secure container. Don’t count on it for security.
Isn’t a way possible to prevent z:/ mapping while creating wine prefix ?
It’s not just the drive letter mapping, Wine doesn’t make any attempt to secure software.
You can run Wine inside an actual security solution.
All my Windows games that I launch from Lutris (which are most, since I tend to avoid Steam and prefer GOG) are launched by default inside a Firejail container configured amongst other things to have no networking enabled.
All you need to do for it is to setup a “command prefix” with firejail and its launch parameters at the Lutris level and it becomes the default one for all games.
So yeah, this runs Wine inside an actual security solution and since it’s setup at the level or the launcher I use, it does it for all the games I launch from it.
I guess not allowing flatpak wine to access anything that is not necessary is the easiest way to achieve it. No idea if it is also the most secure solution.
unless you have it sandboxed in a flatpack container
My linus virus trying to fuck up my disk on nixos (coreutils isn’t in the path)
I’m sorry Linus Torvalds is personally trying to destroy your PC
doesn’t every game have its own c_drive?
more correctly every wineprefix. Depending on how you install games, they might not be running in separate wineprefixes, but I believe steam does it that way
Yea im pretty sure thats the point. The virus will get a drive that has nothing but the infected game on it.
