ClamAv: is anyone paying attention?

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 20:40 -0300, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote:
> Is there, out in the wide open world, an anti virus program for Linux
> viruses 

So far there are no real GNU/Linux viruses, so what good would an
anti-virus do?

> (virii ?) ?
> 
Viruses. There is no latin plural and if there were then it would be
virus or vira. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus

> I'm asking, because I have a potential user who wont accept an
> installation without anti-virus. 

When he transitions from Windows to GNU/Linux then he needs to accept
that some things are different. There are no drive letters, and at this
time there are no serious viruses and thus hardly any anti-virus apps
against linux viruses. I would think you _can run ClamAv on your
workstation, but why would you want to? There are also a few other
scanners,  aegis-virus-scanner is in the universe repo and others can be
found on google.

To give you a perspective, try to google for linux AND virus. There are
practically no useful hits: one guy from a virus scanner company talking
up the threat in 2003, and similar things. Heck, hit number 10 is an
article on how to run Windows viruses under wine out of sheer boredom :)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that GNU/Linux is magically immune,
but at this time there simply is no credible threat, and once there is
fixing the bugs will IMHO be a better solution than adding scanners that
are not reliable and in any case come too late.

If your friend absolutely wants to have a scanner that takes away his
CPU he can contribute by writing a virus first ;)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/viruswriting/