Re: Antivirus for Debian

[Paul Johnson <baloo@ursamundi.org>]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 1:50 PM, Renaud OLGIATI <renaud@olgiati-in-paraguay.org> wrote:

On Thu, 20 Aug 2015 19:33:17 +0100
Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:

> On Thu 20 Aug 2015 at 20:24:16 +0200, Diogene Laerce wrote:

> > > Hello guys. I wanted to know if antivirus is required for Debian or
> > > for linux in general. And if it is required, what are the recommended
> > > antivirus for Debian?
> > > Thank you in advance.

> > Required no, advised I guess.

> You guessed wrong.

Although I know that proof-of-concept viruses (virii ?) have been created in computer labs, has anyone seen one alive in the wild ?

Red Alert comes to mind immediately, and was a major pain in my ass working at Dotster in that company's early (about a decade before EIG bought 'em out and they were still based in Fort Vancouver's Five Corners neighborhood on WA 503) days. Script-kiddie launched rootkits and PHP-based spam scripts tend to be very prevalent and a daily nuisance for my userbase these days, though the former generally depends on weak root passwords or badly behaved daemons running as root and the latter gets limited to a single user account.