About antivirus

[Ole Juul]

Re: About antivirus

oshunluvr: I tend to believe that it is not my responsibility to install software to protect others systems' because they have chosen an inadequate OS. It is up to them to protect themselves. Norton, Microsoft, AVG, and others sell millions of dollars of software to those people when a simple filtering system put in place by email providers could eliminate email software. This too, is not my problem. - sorry...

I'm with you, although if someone was to clean up some forwarded e-mails for the benefit of MS-Windows users then I guess that's a nice gesture. I say "guess" because I'm not really sure if it's the best approach in the long run.

Regarding e-mail, I would like to emphasise that it is essentially a text medium and malware will only be carried if you move outside that and include executables. I know some people are addicted to passing around animated gifs, but that is not really e-mail in my personal opinion. I usually place pictures and executables somewhere on the net for people to pick up with their browser of wget.

[zlow]

Re: About antivirus

While surfing the net, I happened to see a mention about free AVG antivirus for Linux. Is something like this actually required to be installed with Linux? I am new to Linux and my impression about Linux is that Viruses cannot attack a system operating on Linux. Can someone explain please?

The AVG Linux product isn't very good, I wouldn't recommend it. While Linux isn't impenetrable, there are few actual "Linux viruses", and none are active currently that I know of. The bigger danger is phishing, and downloading software and scripts off of the internet that you run either as your user account or as root. Make sure you keep your system up to date. There are a lot of vulnerabilities with Linux, however they are normally fixed pretty quickly. Just remember not to run scripts and installers that you find on the internet without verifying authenticity.

[oshunluvr]

Re: About antivirus

At my company headquarters, we had two USB thumb drive carried boot sector viruses in one week! The boss ordered the lead tech to install an automatic virus scanner that checked every thumb drive when they were inserted on every windows machine - which is several 100. In our case - all the windows machines are imaged on one of the servers, so they can wipe and reload in a few hours.

Still. what a PITA. The only reason we have any windows machines is because most of our customers are not computer people and they think they need a windows GUI to operate the systems.

Well - enough thread hijacking - back to work!

[oshunluvr]

Re: About antivirus

While surfing the net, I happened to see a mention about free AVG antivirus for Linux. Is something like this actually required to be installed with Linux? I am new to Linux and my impression about Linux is that Viruses cannot attack a system operating on Linux. Can someone explain please?

The AVG Linux product isn't very good, I wouldn't recommend it. While Linux isn't impenetrable, there are few actual "Linux viruses", and none are active currently that I know of. The bigger danger is phishing, and downloading software and scripts off of the internet that you run either as your user account or as root. Make sure you keep your system up to date. There are a lot of vulnerabilities with Linux, however they are normally fixed pretty quickly. Just remember not to run scripts and installers that you find on the internet without verifying authenticity.

The other thing I see that's common is site that announce you're "infected" when you log onto them! I always chuckle when I stumble across one, but they should be illegal and taken down.

[dibl]

Re: About antivirus

At my company headquarters, we had two USB thumb drive carried boot sector viruses in one week!

In my industry the threats (long list of legal and financial items, viruses are not the worst) posed by "personal" USB thumb drives is so dire that we're about to have them absolutely abolished. Every employee who can demonstrate a reasonable need is getting one of these: https://www.ironkey.com/

which is serialized, passworded, and entered into a database. When the transition is complete, bringing a personal USB thumb drive into the building will be cause for termination of an employee.

[The Liquidator]

Re: About antivirus

While surfing the net, I happened to see a mention about free AVG antivirus for Linux. Is something like this actually required to be installed with Linux? I am new to Linux and my impression about Linux is that Viruses cannot attack a system operating on Linux. Can someone explain please?

The AVG Linux product isn't very good, I wouldn't recommend it. While Linux isn't impenetrable, there are few actual "Linux viruses", and none are active currently that I know of. The bigger danger is phishing, and downloading software and scripts off of the internet that you run either as your user account or as root. Make sure you keep your system up to date. There are a lot of vulnerabilities with Linux, however they are normally fixed pretty quickly. Just remember not to run scripts and installers that you find on the internet without verifying authenticity.

Agreed. I recently saw a test of a number of virus scanners in Linux Format magazine in the UK which found AVG to be the worst of the lot giving it only 2 out of 10 because it missed most of the stuff they had planted! If it's that bad it's not worth installing. Whilst I don't usually take what they say as gospel that certainly does seem worth listening to and on that basis AVG seems to be worth avoiding. If you are going to run AV I suggest you either install KlamAV (in the repos) or get hold of a copy of BitDefender, which is free for personal use.

[Telengard]

Re: About antivirus

If you are going to run AV I suggest you either install KlamAV (in the repos) or get hold of a copy of BitDefender, which is free for personal use.

Speaking of which:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3107714.0

I use ClamAV from the command line to scan Windows files. I don't honestly know whether any of the existing Linux anti-virus solutions are worth the effort for home desktop users. Safe computing awareness and common sense are your best protection in any case.

I used AVG on my Windows systems for years before switching to Linux full time. Actually AVG is still installed on all the Windows systems here, but I rarely use them.

[The Liquidator]

Re: About antivirus

I have AVG on my windows XP VM which I only really use now to errrrmmm...... update the AVG anti-virus!

Well, I've got Tomtom home on it I won't go down that route

[GreyGeek]

Re: About antivirus

I have AVG on my windows XP VM which I only really use now to errrrmmm...... update the AVG anti-virus!
...

Been there, done that.

I used to dual boot with XP, to support that fly-by-wire app I wrote for a new kind of tractor. After the development and support was completed I found that I was regularly booting into XP for no other reason than to run the Windows and AV updates! I was doing it absentmindedly out of habit, just like smokers who light up another cigarette and place it on the ash tray, only to notice two or three other partially smoked and still smoldering cigarettes.

[ViperLancer]

Re: About antivirus

If you are going to run AV I suggest you either install KlamAV (in the repos) or get hold of a copy of BitDefender, which is free for personal use.

Speaking of which:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3107714.0

I use ClamAV from the command line to scan Windows files. I don't honestly know whether any of the existing Linux anti-virus solutions are worth the effort for home desktop users. Safe computing awareness and common sense are your best protection in any case.

I used AVG on my Windows systems for years before switching to Linux full time. Actually AVG is still installed on all the Windows systems here, but I rarely use them.

Well, as I'm new to the Linux side, I will say 2 things.

1 - For Windows, I use AVG Free on all my PC's, and while it doesn't protect against everything (what does in Windows?), with a small amount of common sense it does a great job. Plus, it's one of the few (if not only) Windows antivirus products I know of that offers REALTIME virus protection and many nice, useful features in the free version.
2 - My old boss was a Linux Guru, did some completely amazing things from custom-coding his own Linux scripts and programs, such as creating his own method to have multiple Linux servers sync with each other and host multiple websites effectively across the server cluster. Not basic methods, his were amazing. He ran ClamAV on all our Linux servers (I think he had it scan all files as the server saved them to disk), not to protect the server, but to protect the Windows clients that accessed files from them.

Oh, and LOL at GreyGeek's comment. Updating Windows & its AV simply out of habit of updating them... That's funny!