Well, I did get Word to run on wine once, though it had a number of problems which ment it was not 100% useful, but thats for the future, CrossOver is now. I didn't mean to imply that this would give Word access to the kernel, I was only asking the question, is all my user stuff is now at risk? Obviously the scope of corruption would be limited to my /home and maybe some /tmp stuff, but this is enough to bring my session down and make it unusable. Worse, a macro virus could infect my other Word docs in a uncontrolled way (no virus protection) and all my collegues will start to hate me for sending them on. I don't even have a way to disinfect myself after the fact.
civileme wrote: > Nick Thompson wrote: > >> So lets say that I get M$ Word running under wine, or I spash out on >> CodeWeavers Crossover Office. If Word is running correctly, I assume >> my pristine MDK installation has suddenly become vunerable to Word >> Macro viruses. The Linux kernel doesn't have windows anti-virus >> protection to save me from this, so is there anything I can do to >> protect myself? I could backup each time I want to run it I suppose >> ;-) Or maybe I've got it all wrong... Any ideas? > > VERY wrong... > First of all, you won't get word to run on WINE because WINE handles > only standard APIs, not the secret ones that Microsoft uses, which > gives word and its macro facility DIRECT access to the Windows kernel. > > Crossover only emulates the access, certainly gives no access to the > linux-kernel because it has only the privileges of the user running > it... And unless you are running as root, you CAN'T WRITE TO /bin > /usr/bin or anything else sitting in your executable path except > perhaps your home directory. You might get a virus but > it couldn't propagate. > > EVEN IF you were able to run as root (and deal with the poison red > screen), and you were running Word, and you had a macro virus, it > couldn't do very much because it isn't the windows kernel. The most > likely result would be a segfault/kernel oops or a message about > privilege violation. > > True, the linux kernel has no anti-virus features. They aren't > needed. viruses are theoretically possible, and a few have been > written, but they can't propagate, so they remain academic > curiosities. Worms are theoretically possible, and a few have been > written and they have played nasty games with systems that didn't stay > updated (Yes, you can update easily without rebooting), but usually > those exploits come out about 6 months after the fix is available.
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