First off i know that suse linux cant be infected by window based viruses and that as a whole reactive based technology such as anti virus wont be that effective as it is always dependent on the virus spreading first-but is there a way to have a real time antivirus scanner under linux? It would be nice to know if i file i opened had a nasty virus in it like the way it does in windows.
I first came to think of this since the new opera browser has built in protection from avg. Ive tried opera but still prefer firefox with all the addons like noscript and adblockplus etc.
Well, if you go into Software Management and search with the name virus, you can find a couple of programs that come up like clamav and antivir, but I have not had much luck with them myself. However, if you really want commercial type protection you are most likely not going to be using the most recent version of openSUSE for instance.
Instead you need to switch to a commercial product like SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED) and pay for a commercial anti-virus Linux product such as is provided by McAffee or Kaspersky who will maintain & keep such products up to date, for a fee. SLED has a much longer life cycle so commercial companies will invest in the time to write an anti-virus product for it, further commercial products like SLED are more often used by businesses that can afford to pay for such protection.
Since the life cycle of openSUSE is shorter, most people that use it are getting it for free and at least so far, contracting a virus in Linux has proven less likely (not because it can’t be done), commercial companies have chosen to not write current anti-virus software for it.
I guess the bottom line here, is specifically what virus (that is running in the wild) are you trying to defend against?
If trying to defend against a virus that has not been invented yet, that is a bit difficult and problematic. While, YES, there are anti-virus programs for Linux, their ability to do the job of detecting and removing a hypothetical Linux virus that ‘may’ be invented in the future, is rather questionable. Why questionable? Because there are no virus to test them against. And without good testing, most software is not worth much. Testing is essential.
I agree with jdmcdaniel3 that it should be possible to write a virus to infect Linux, … but it just has not been done yet to any significantly effective extent (for a number of different reasons).
>
> First off i know that suse linux cant be infected by window based
> viruses and that as a whole reactive based technology such as anti
> virus wont be that effective as it is always dependent on the virus
> spreading first-but is there a way to have a real time antivirus
> scanner under linux? It would be nice to know if i file i opened had
> a nasty virus in it like the way it does in windows.
It is possible, yes. It is done via a kernel module. Search info on
“dazuko”.
It is also done for samba shares, in order to protect the windows
machines it serves. It could be done via that kernel module, or via the
samba daemon, somehow
But don’t ask me, I don’t know the details, only that it exists.
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Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))