[headbirth]

Anyone know if this protection for the everyday user?

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by headbirth:
Anyone know if this protection for the everyday user?

A few months ago I toyed with this same idea but I heard that ClamAV can only scan and not remove viruses. It has two parts: the virus scanner itself and the virus definition updater, which both run via the command line. I think you'd have to set up a cron job to have this run somewhere in the neighborhood of every 5 minutes to be of any use to an end user.

But then again, what would it be scanning for? There's really no viruses that it would be able to scan for on the Mac side. I think ClamAV is better suited for hooking into a mailer like postfix or sendmail to scan mail attachments that gets sent through it. So I think the bottom line would be that no, ClamAV's probably not for the everyday user.

[headbirth]

Curious ... do you think an opensource free AntiVirus project would be effective? or would it just give virus makers a clearer idea on how to design their viruses?

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by headbirth:
Curious ... do you think an opensource free AntiVirus project would be effective? or would it just give virus makers a clearer idea on how to design their viruses?

Good question, I think I've had thoughts like that over the years about open source software. I think virus writers don't bother worrying about circumventing anti-virus software. First they have to find an some buffer overflow (or whatever else they do these days), then they have to write a virus to not only take advantage of the vulnerability but also to be able to spread effectively. I guess it's valid to say that they could analyze the open-source anti-virus code and then write elusive viruses, but then what about all the Norton, Mcaffe, etc users? I think they hedge their bets quite heavily and figure that there's always people out there that a) Have not applied vendor patches and b)are not running anti-virus software. There's gotta be hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs in the world that fall under either/both of these situations, no?

Stimulating thought, though. What're your thoughts?

[headbirth]

I'm not all that familiar with how opensource software projects are organized, but I can only see great benifits from an Open Anti-Virus solution.

A simple app ... with user submitted antiviral updates...