Risks/Disadvantages associated with Wine
Wine is just a compatibility layer, programs run in it have the same privileges as the logged in user.
From their FAQ:
7.5. How good is Wine at sandboxing Windows apps?
Wine does not sandbox in any way at all. When run under Wine, a Windows app can do anything your user can. Wine does not (and cannot) stop a Windows app directly making native syscalls, messing with your files, altering your startup scripts, or doing other nasty things.
Also read 7.4, especially:
- Never run executables from sites you don't trust. Infections have already happened.
Wine has to possibility to share your documents (or even your home directory or /) with the application. Even if programs are not malicious, it could still put junk on your system, like desktop.ini (controls the view of folders in Explorer).
Viruses that are run in wine will generally stay within the C drive which wine creates, however, they can still cause harm to your system through startup entries and other method used by malware. However, they generally will not affect specifically Linux portions of your computer. This does not mean that it is impossible. A virus can be made specifically for wine to infect unprotected Linux binaries or attempt to escalate privileges on your system.
Using Wine with Internet Explorer or other programs will only have potential malware reach your wine "drive", which is a folder structure inside of ~/.wine, as well as any other mapped folders.
And regarding viruses. The viruses may infect only those Windows' files, but Windows viruses do not run on Linux effectively - i.e. they won't infect your Linux system files unless its an actual Linux virus.