From our security guru....
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Virus scanning on AIX
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 09:27:58 +0100
From: Andrew Findlay <andrew.findlay@skills-1st.co.uk>
To: Jane Curry <jane.curry@skills-1st.co.uk>
Re nv-l:
Bill Evans is right - there is no need for AV software to protect any
Unix-like operating system, but in some cases it is useful to run AV
*on* such systems to protect Windows machines. This is particularly
true of mail servers, and the ones I run (based on Linux and FreeBSD)
use ClamAV which is an open-source AV scanner:
http://www.clamav.net/
ClamAV should run on most Unix-like systems. There are also some
commercial AV scanners that run on Unix (e.g. Sophos).
It is certainly possible to write Unix viruses, but very few have ever
been released and none of those have spread in the wild. The main
reasons are:
* The strong separation between ordinary users and root.
* Better systems management practices on most installed systems.
* A development philosophy that is more interested in security than in
new features.
* A much more diverse population, with different CPU types and
different OS distributions, makes the Unix base much more resilient
than the monoculture represented by Windows on x86.
Andrew
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