full-disclosure - Re: January 15 is Personal Firewall Day, help the cause

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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0401162136350.5606@shishi.roaringpenguin.com>
From: dfs at roaringpenguin.com (David F. Skoll)
Subject: Re: January 15 is Personal Firewall Day, help
 the cause

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Mary Landesman wrote:

> There are several firms offering desktop antivirus for Linux. Here are a few
> that come to mind:

Thanks.

But unless I'm mistaken, the database of virus signatures included with those
products is either entirely or overwhelmingly for Windows viruses.  These
products are designed to protect Windows systems that may be accessing files
on Linux or UNIX systems.

The McAfee blurb, for instance:

"There are now in excess of 85,000 threats and more than 275 new
threats appear each month"

That describes Windows viruses, not Linux.

The Authenium blurb, for instance:

"Provides virus scanning of embedded (OLE) documents. When documents
are scanned, if an infected document is embedded in an Excel
spreadsheet or a PowerPoint document,..."

The BitDefender blurb is rather funny:

"Available for most UNIX platforms, the product has the role to keep
you away from worms like Morris or Scalper..."

Let's see, the Morris worm spread in 1988, over 15 years ago. :-)  I don't
think anyone's even running any of the vulnerable architectures any more
(VAX and Sun-3 boxes running ancient versions of Sendmail.)

FreeBSD scalper worm was from June, 2002, over 1.5 years ago.
According to Symantec:

"So far, we have not received any customer reports of this worm."

(http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/freebsd.scalper.worm.html)

I guess a couple of worms in 15 years is a little better than, quote,
"275 new threats... each month"

> Thus, if you are running Linux workstations and you do want antivirus
> software, there are options available.

If you want to send me $99.95 in return for nothing, I'll gladly accept
it.  It'll be about as effective as buying AV software for Linux.

Regards,

David.