AV Strategy

[Soda_Popinsky]

1. Does not have realtime protection, just a scanner.
2. Open source (I think the only one that is reputable)
3. Custom sigs
4. Configuration includes filters, so I'm not scanning text files or my .mp3 library.
5. Sigs are updated frequently
6. Free and sexy

I believe because it is open source, the more popular it gets, the stronger the scanner will be. Developers will be able to help out with signatures and be very quick with their releases. It is just a virus scanner and nothing more.

[Soda_Popinsky]

http://www.fortinet.com/doc/FGT3600DS.pdf

I've heard of "Hardware" Firewalls...

Would this be considered a Hardware Antivirus? How could someone make a router with AV that scan's traffic like that Fortigate? Is there a linux distribution that could do that?

Smoothwall = hardware firewall, x = hardware antivirus?

[Spyder32]

Hrmm, I have a question.. Is this a good solution: Having Norton as the primary A/V application and continuing to use it (I think someone else stated this aswell) until the free subscription is up alongside AVG as kind of a "backup" A/V application which will be a secondary and will do all the scans in between of Norton. Basically having them work together instead of one. Is that a good solution?

If not, what do you recommend I do? Get rid of Norton and just use AVG?

[Soda_Popinsky]

As long as realtime protection is not enabled on both, only on one, I don't think it will be a big deal.

[Spyder32]

Indeed.. because if it is it would get annoying or because it would cause something to not work properly? I believe Norton has realtime protection enabled by default although I never noticed so I'm going to turn that off and leave AVG to have realtime on.

[chsh]

I was asked in PM what {N|S}AVCE 7/8 are, so I figured if one person asked others unfamiliar with the acronym might want clarification as well.
NAVCE = Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition
SAVCE = Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition

EDIT:

Originally posted here by Soda_Popinsky
Is there a linux distribution that could do that?
Smoothwall = hardware firewall, x = hardware antivirus?

If you had a configuration that featured a proxy server, email server, etc., and were able to pass the traffic through a real time scanning engine, there's no reason it couldn't be done on linux. I'm not too up on my proxying with Apache or Squid, but something like that may be possible. Might be something to research if you are really intrigued by it. I know the three most popular unix mail servers (Sendmail, Postfix, and QMail) will easily support AV scanning and such, and I have worked with that. You'd be surprised how easily you can keep your network clean with only simple email scanning and desktop AV clients.

[xierox]

Originally posted here by Soda_Popinsky
1. Does not have realtime protection, just a scanner.

By "realtime protection" you mean like it doesn't scan every file you open for being a virus, right? If I'm right, I can understand it'd probably speed up your system, but do you consider this worth the possibility of getting infected because it's not scaning stuff as you open it? Trying to learn here, it's an honest question.

Xierox

[Soda_Popinsky]

Correct, it doesn't scan files before they are opened, check HTML for malicious .js, check incoming and outgoing mail, or instant messages or anything else. I don't like software that insists on becoming part of everything else unless it is asked to. ClamWin is a scanning tool, and that's about it.

I have a powerful computer and can afford to use realtime protection, but I believe an opensource AV like Clam will dominate in the future.