Why did bitdefender create a user?

[Alexandra Zaharia]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Robert Holtzman<holtzm at cox.net> wrote:
> I installed BitDefender a while back and just had occasion to look at
> the user list. There sits BitDefender. Why? Anyone?X

Hello,

I don't know which BitDefender product you installed. There are quite
a few, ranging from command line to GUI scanners to a Live CD (a
rescue CD) and 'corporate' products for handling e-mail and file
(Samba) servers.

However, most of these products also add this 'bitdefender' user on
your system, that you've noticed already. The reason for this is that
the most part of the 'daemons' that these products are divided into,
if they do not require to be run directly as root, do not allow you to
run them as a normal user.

It's quite logical if you come to think of it. Since the services that
each of these daemons look into are applied system wide, they should
and are not in any way linked to regular user accounts.

So if you'll issue a 'ps aux | grep bd', you will notice a few
processes run from within your current BitDefender installation, some
of which are run as 'root', if necessary, and the rest of them being
run as 'bitdefender'.

Think of it as a service like apache that has most of its processes
ran under the 'www-data' user.

Furthermore, the 'bitdefender' user is a system user. It does not get
a home directory or a shell or anything. As a matter of fact, the
'shell' has been specified as being '/bin/false'.

I hope this helps.