McAfee makes a Linux AV product

McAfee makes a Linux AV product

Posted Apr 11, 2006 0:50 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: McAfee makes a Linux AV product by rickmoen
Parent article: Crossplatform virus - the latest proof of concept

Exactly!

All of these products seem to me to have a proven security track record.. A bad track record, that is.

These things have openned up holes in root in the past for potential attackers.

If I worked somewere that required certain types of anti-virus stuff to be installed, I'd install it... in a chroot'd environment seperate from everything else and do my best to figure out how to make it work as a regular user through trickery or some VM or whatnot so that I could have it functional, yet seperate.

Although I doubt that would be to popular among management...

In light of the threats that viruses can pose I think that Gnome and KDE should look at integrating open source, passive, antivirus protection.

Things like having email scanning with Evolution similar to how it supports anti-spam scanning. Files being downloaded could be then scanned.

Or maybe integrate it with the FAM support so that files being added to the home directory will be scanned automaticly irregradless of their source. I don't think that this should be hard to do and ClamAV will probably work very well.

This should, I figure, be optional and turned off by default.

This should provide assurance to new users and also prevent situations were Linux user "A" finds funny picture and text and sends it to Linux user "B". Linux user "B" thinks it's funny and sends it to Windows user "C". Windows user "C" then becomes infected from virus sent to them from Linux user A and B, which then goes on to infect everybody else's windows PC including customer's. Of course the virus doesn't affect the Linux users at all, but that's not realy that wonderfull that they sent a Windows user a attatchment that does.

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