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Antiviruses? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I know that Linux is more secure than Windows and normally doesn't need an antivirus, but know myself I'm gonna end up downloading something at some point from somewhere on the internet, and it would be good to be prepared. So, which antivirus would you recommend for Linux (Mint specifically) just to double up on security?

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[+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)
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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Wine is not an emulator. It's not sandboxed either. If you can do it as a user, a program running in wine can do it too.

    There's nothing stopping a piece of malware from crawling your disk for sensitive information, or encrypting your files for ransom.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you run it through something like bottles offer a bit of protection in that respect?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    I wouldn't think so. Isn't bottles just an easier way to manage wine prefixes? If so, it doesn't do anything to hide your Linux system from the executable.

    Wine prefixes are not sandboxes. They are a way to separate the windows-level configuration for different programs (eg env vars, or drivers, etc).

    Wine is a translation layer between a compiled windows binary and your Linux syscalls/libraries/device drivers/etc, nothing more.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Pirated ganes may contain linux viruses. No need for wine

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Hard disagree - the point is a decade ago there wasn't enough Linux market share for bad actors to target Linux. Proton is a compatibility layer, which while technically being a sandbox, it isn't designed around security the way a browser sandbox is. It would not be hard for a virus embedded in a made-for-windows program to identify that it's actually a proton sandbox, then deploy a Linux-specific payload (assuming the malware designer gave it some forethought for that situation). Heck - there's plenty of viruses that do their work in scripting languages that don't care what OS you're running on.

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