Avast antivirus for linux

[Felipe Figueiredo]

On Tue 22 Apr 2008 16:12:16 Pastor JW wrote:
> On Tuesday 22 April 2008 11:39:14 am Wulfy wrote:


> > As a matter of interest, how many viruses are out there for Mac OS*
> > and *nix as opposed to the millions form Win*?  How likely is it that
> > we are vulnerable?
>
> Well, in that vein, because I have never had a burglary in my house
> does not mean I have no use for the door locks does it?  Fact is,

Straw man here. The analogy shouldn't be your house, but the context in 
which your house exists -  like your neighborhood or city. If burglary is 
theoretically possible but has never occured in your city (or even 
country), would you still use locks in your house?

Just because there are proof of concept viruses/worms for linux, it still 
doesn't mean that they exist in the wild, nor that linux is stil 
vulnerable to them. I agree with others, I haven't seen evidence that 
drives me to use anti-virus for the purpose of linux protection.

> without the stops in place, we are indeed leaving ourselves very
> vulnerable!  Vulnerability has nothing to do with how likely something
> is to happen, but rather whether or not it is POSSIBLE.

BTW, antivirus is not about protection at all. It tries to remedy a 
situation in which you are already compromised. You really should be 
worried about not getting compromised in the first place. What everyone 
that understands a little bit about *nix security agree (so far is 
unanimous from what I read) is that prevention and security maintenance 
is enough. 

Besides, an important security point is to have the least ammount of code 
running, so if antivirus is not needed, you shouldn't use it, since it 
would need severe priviledge and as any other piece of code, is bug 
prone, and generally closed source, so you can't trust it ( How can you 
be sure there isn't a priviledge escalation bug in your favorite closed 
source antivirus?). If you can't trust a piece of code to be bug-free, 
why would you run it with priviledge enough to make any kind of changes 
in your system files, in order to... protect you? 

regards
FF