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I am relatively new to OSX in general, I started using it two weeks only, the app Wineskin (a.k.a Wine in Linux environment) is used to run a Windows application inside osx by creating the correct environment, my question is: if a virus/malware isn't specifically designed to hit osx through wineskin, but only design to hit windows environment (but still sophisticated one), can it hit osx if I run it inside wineskin?

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    If its designed to hit a windows environment its ability to run will depend on the software itself, it could in theory still run, but its extremely unlikely.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 10:52

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Wineskin I believe runs as a wrapper around the Windows written code, like an emulation. So you don't have Windows installed, meaning that the system structure doesn't actually exist on your OS X machine. A Windows virus will only effect Windows machines and cannot jump across as you are not running Windows, however you still need AV on OS X as they are targeted just as much. It's possible for someone to write something to exploit Wineskin to attack OS X, however this is the same for anything and would never happen as the specific information required for this is dynamic based on each machine/person/application.

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  • Since an emulator is a middle layer between the two environments, let's say it converts the commands/pipes/files ..etc to work under osx, thus don't you think it may be possible to convert the malicious code into an osx-friendly code and run it ? of course the code itself will have to be so friendly to be accurately run!
    – Ash
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 11:00
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    Anything is possible, but the chances that would happen are slim to non. If it is emulating one set of commands from Windows to OS X then they would need to exist in Windows to start with and be relevant to the emulation. The emulation won't include every possible Windows cmd-let, program, etc. someone could target a specific part to exploit you. But you have more danger from browsing the internet with Safari then you do from using something like Wineskin.
    – 0x0000001E
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 11:06
  • Wine cannot allow it because there is no actual windows file system.
    – bret7600
    Commented Apr 22, 2015 at 0:28

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