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I want to run some windows applications under Wine/PlayOnLinux. let's say they are infected or they have some malicious behavior.

Is it safe to create another user account and run these program under Wine with that account?

-- Edit --

My question is more related to the user accounts.

What if i run this malicious software with another user account which is not an admin (can't run sudo) and has no access to anywhere else except its own home directory.

So, in this scenario are my personal files at my primary account safe? is the ubuntu root ( / ) partition safe and untouchable? i think it should be.

According to this link running wine as a separate user is a good thing to do.

But what about the removal devices or mounted ntfs partitions? i think their not the case and can be infected easly.

Ravexina
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  • If possible, run as guest account. No chance to restrict an user/application more than that, I think. But not sure if it allows wine to run without errors at all... – Byte Commander Dec 02 '15 at 10:23
  • I don't have any guest user. I installed ubuntu with ubuntu mini iso. So i created an account with the useradd: useradd -m -s /bin/bash username then i set a password for it. is it enough to make sure everything is isolate and safe? – Ravexina Dec 02 '15 at 10:30
  • Don't know, unfortunately... :-/ – Byte Commander Dec 02 '15 at 10:32

1 Answers1

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Normally it wouldn't cause any harm if it's just a simple worm, but many worms also try to spread, so they will try to infect machines in your network which might be running windows.

As Networking/Internet works in Wine/Playonlinux, it would be possible for the malicious software to spread around.

Do you want to try to run such a file?

Edit - Answering your comment

That should be fine. I would recommend doing this stuff in VM though, without a network ofcourse. Then you can let that virus, etc go nuts.... Observe the logs, etc, whatever you wish to accomplish, but don't forget, these worms are just small hacks targeting specific bugs, takes a lot of effort to build Linux, which scales from embedded to super-computers. I just thought that deserves more attention than that pesky worm. Don't you think so?

We are Borg
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