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Information Technology News Being a good netizen – protecting Linux from network nasties
Information Technology News Being a good netizen – protecting Linux from network nasties | Being a good netizen – protecting Linux from network nasties |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 01 November 2007 | |
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Page 3 of 3 So then, what’s some good software you can use? Here’s several.Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
A new feature added in September also allows scanning for potentially unwanted applications – in other words, applications that are not necessarily malicious but which could potentially be misused in a different context. One example is a tool to identify weak passwords. Clearly this can be used by people with harmful intent, but by the same tool could well be a legitimate utility by systems administrators to actually bolster security, not weaken it. ClamAV will identify these programs, giving you the chance to consider its utility and right to stay. (As an aside, it’s nice to ask; the makers of Angry IP Scanner would certainly be pleased if Windows anti-virus manufacturers stopped deleting their program under the guise of it being a “hacktool”!) You can extend ClamAV with, well, KlamAV – a nicely-named KDE GUI frontend. Using KlamAV, users report that ClamAV has a look and feel more like the commercial anti-virus applications you might see on that other operating system (the one we’re trying to protect.) KlamAV has three major useful options. It provides a first-run wizard to help set up ClamAV just the way you want it from the onset. Secondly, it allows you to run scans at will over a set of disks and folders selected from a graphical tree view. Thirdly, it offers a virus library which you can browse through and look up symptoms and solutions. KlamAV will also keep ClamAV up-to-date for you (unless you choose to disable this behaviour.) Kaspersky Lab offers a collection of Linux security tools to remove virus threats from workstations, file servers, Samba servers, mail servers, proxy servers and mail gateways. It offers remote administration as well as backup storage of infected files before they are cleaned and other features. These products are not open-source, nor are they free. You can find more information online. F-PROT anti-virus for Linux workstations is available free of charge for personal users. This solution builds on the F-PROT system which has been in use for many years on Windows systems, and boasts a heuristic engine to proactively detect unknown viruses in addition to those for which it has a definite signature. Sophos Endpoint Security and Control delivers high-performance anti-virus scanning for Linux. Its central Enterprise Console product will manage both Windows and Linux systems, and works well in a networked environment with many deployed instances. Sophos claim to have out-of-the-box support for the widest range of Linux distros. Finally, Central Command – referred to earlier – sell Vexira anti-virus for Linux. This product is designed to find virus infections on data storage devices and systems. Central Command claim their product has been specifically designed from the ground-up for Linux rather than being a Linux port of a Windows product. You will easily find other anti-virus and anti-malware tools for Linux. Be sure to download and install one; do it for the Internet. Sure, nobody will thank you because your Windows-using friends will carry on blissfully unaware you prevented their computer screeching to a grinding halt, but you’ll know. And that’s what matters. |
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