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windows virus from the game played through proton on linux finding itself on an empty c drive (files.catbox.moe)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 134 points 1 month ago (16 children)

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.

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  • [–] 72 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    So, what's the solution? Debian Stable?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    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.

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