Windows Virus harmful in Fedora?

[derblob (Anonymus)]

I got a game on an old hard drive and windows 11 Defender reacted to it. In Linux Fedora I made a scan of it with clamAV but there nothing was found. Should I be worried If I only would use the data in Linux Fedora via wine. Or could it be dangerous ?

Thanks in advance

[coonmanx (Jim Coonradt)]

I am going to guess that there will be no issue with it but I am no expert on such things. However, I did want to say that I got a kick out of the title of the thread. When I read it, I came away with emphasis on “Windows virus” as if Windows is an actual virus… Some may agree. Sorry for the distraction and carry on. Linux has very robust security protocols.

[pg-tips (P G)]

Depends on the nature of the virus.

Wine’s FAQ says:

Is Wine malware-compatible?

Yes. Just because Wine runs on a non-Windows OS doesn’t mean you’re protected from viruses, trojans, and other forms of malware.

There are several things you can do to protect yourself:

• Never run executables from sites you don’t trust. Infections have already happened.
• In web browsers and mail clients, be suspicious of links to URLs you don’t understand and trust.
• Never run any application (including Wine applications) as root (see above).
• Use a virus scanner, e.g. ClamAV is a free virus scanner you might consider using if you are worried about an infection; see also Ubuntu’s notes on how to use ClamAV. No virus scanner is 100% effective, though.
• Removing the default Wine Z: drive, which maps to the unix root directory, is a weak defense. It will not prevent Windows applications from reading your entire filesystem, and will prevent you from running Windows applications that aren’t reachable from a Wine drive (like C: or D:). A workaround is to copy/move/symlink downloaded installers to ~/.wine/drive_c before you can run them.
• If you’re running applications that you suspect to be infected, run them as their own Linux user or in a virtual machine (the ZeroWine malware analyzer works this way).

[Espionage724]

@derblob

Should I be worried If I only would use the data in Linux Fedora via wine. Or could it be dangerous ?

If it’s a newer game, I’d be concerned (Proton’s popular); older games might not be able to do lower-level stuff through unexpected Wine.

If the source is too-questionable, I’d re-source the game; most older stuff is well-vetted on Archive, and GOG sells good-packaged DRM-free versions with easy wine GUI installers and innoextract! There’s high-quality console emus like PCSX2 and RetroArch too.