This just proves the point I made earlier. If you look below you shall
notice I said:
<quote>
You may see virus scanners available for GNU/Linux -- these are
made to detect Windows viruses (which can't harm GNU/Linux at
all). This can be useful if you have multiple OSs installed, or if
you share a network with WIndos boxes.
</quote>
These programmes are no different. If you look at the Technical
Information introduction (http://www.amavis.org/amavis.html#intro),
you will see it says:
<quote>
Most people will say: "A virus scanner? For UN*X? Why? Viruses do not
work in a UNIX environment." On the first glance they are right (even
if there are at least two viruses which run under Linux - well,
actually they are Trojan Horses).
On the second view though, imagine a heterogene network environment
with both UN*X and DOS / Windows / Macintosh workstations. Now think
of an UN*X server that serves Windows and/or Macintosh workstations
via a POP3 service. Would it not be nice to ensure attachments coming
via email are scanned for viruses before they reach a system they are
able to infect? Well - that is what this package is for. It resides on
the server that handles your incoming mails. When a mail arrives,
instead of being delivered via procmail directly, is parsed through a
script that extracts all attachments from the mail, unpacks (if
needed) and scannes them using a professional virus scanner program.
</quote>
In other words, these scanners do run on GNU/Linux, but scan for
WIndows virii. This ensures that all e-mail is clean *before* it
retreived onto a system that is capable of being infected.
On Tue, 12 Jun 2001 03:33, Michael D. Viron wrote:
> Actually, that isn't the case. Mcafee does in fact make a version
> of its virus scanning software for linux--there are others that are
> listed at http://www.amavis.org/
>
> Michael
>
> At 12:13 PM 06/12/2001 +0000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> >There are no anti-virus programmes for GNU/Linux -- the main reason
> >for this being the lack of virii for this OS. UNIX/Linux virii
> > usually exploit security holes in software. In every case security
> > fixes had been available long before the attacks. In other words,
> > the few who were affected by virii suffered only because they had
> > not kept their systems up-to-date with the latest packages. The
> > best virus protection you can have is to keep you system
> > up-to-date with the latest official Mandrake package releases.
> > Software Manager is ideal for this.
> >
> >In the M$ world, things are different. M$ don't bother fixing the
> >holes that virii exploit, instead delegating the job to virus
> > scanning companies, who can merely scan for virii, not fix the
> > holes.. This means you have to frequently scan your discs, and if
> > something *does* get through the "protection" (no virus scanner is
> > 100% accurate) you're seriously stuffed.
> >
> >You may see virus scanners available for GNU/Linux -- these are
> > made to detect Windows viruses (which can't harm GNU/Linux at
> > all). This can be useful if you have multiple OSs installed, or if
> > you share a network with WIndos boxes.
> >
> >On Mon, 11 Jun 2001 16:07, Robert Basye3rd wrote:
> >> Is it necessary to run a antivirus program on Linux Mandrake 8.0?
> >> If so which one is the best and are there any free antivirus
> >> programs out there?
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
