Antivirus for OS X and/or Linux? [closed]

What antivirus solutions would you recommend for OS X and Linux desktops? Is antivirus software even necessary?

Solution 1:

The obvious answer here is clamAV, which has a unix and mac version (clamxav).

Avast! and Norton are both now offering anti-virus for macs.

Panda anti-virus is also avaliable on Linux and AVG are offering a "Linux server version".

If your handling windows files a virus checker might well be a good idea. However if you obey the unix security model (e.g. don't run as root) you should be protected from a lot of stuff.

If the machine is a server it might be worth running a root kit checker on a cron job.

Solution 2:

ClamAV is a pretty nice open source antivirus solution for unix based operating systems.

As for "is it necessaray"? I personally do not even run AV software on my windows machines, I use other security methods along with good old safe browsing habits to avoid viruses. That being said, it is probably not a bad idea. While only a fraction of viruses target linux/osx, they do exist.

I would especially consider it on an internet facing server.

Solution 3:

I also use the already mentioned ClamAV ( http://www.clamxav.com/ ). Not so much because I am worried about a Mac virus, but as bit of paranoid preventive precaution.

I have had it detect and clean an infected windows .exe file that I was transferring from one machine to another while using my mac as the middle man. So if only to prevent your machine from acting as a transmitter of infection, it probably doesn't hurt.

Solution 4:

Since you say the users are untrusted, then I would suggest you should consider some sort of AV. Your OSX users might try to install cracked software or there might be another vulnerability found in Safari or Adobe Flash.

The fact that the sort of people who read serverfault are unlikely to get infected doesn't imply that security is unnecessary for naive users.