It all depends if you want realtime scanning or not. There are only a few products out there currently for Linux that feature realtime scanning for AV, currently Trend Micro ServerProtect for Linux (SPLX), Sophos, and McAfee I believe. With Symantec's product in beta right now. The problem with realtime scanning on Linux is that it requires a kernel hooking module (KHM) in order to properly scan in realtime. What this means is that for EVERY new kernel (no matter how small the variation) a new KHM must be released in order for realtime to continue to function properly. This is pretty ridiculous...and could be solved if Red Hat (and other vendors) offered some kind of API like Microsoft offers with Windows to accomodate this. But they refuse (I manage the SPLX product on a Red Hat corporate desktop soon to be on 300K+ workstations) access to this or the creation of this (at least to Trend Micro - who is a big 3 vendor in AV). If you want on-demand scanning only (as BitDefender offers) - then surely BitDefender rates highly. I, myself, would choose Kaspersky for Linux. It is updated quite often and it supports the most packers. On the Windows side, AVG and ClamAV are just terrible. Even ClamAV on *nix is not a true AV product...but it works (well) and it is free. It lacks heuristics and only goes on file by file based detection. Whereas "standard" AV will actually be able to detect variants in some cases because they don't have quite a simplistic scanning methodology. If you want more info on what is good and bad on Windows, drop me a line off list. I have a paper that will be published in October for Virus Bulletin 2005. My research was using XP honeypots with only AV for protection...before the whole MS "honeymonkey" term was coined I had a similar setup running (albeit for a different purpose). -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org on behalf of Ken Fuchs Sent: Fri 8/26/2005 3:06 PM To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: [tclug-list] Closed source BitDefender - best anti-virus on Linux? I ran across a PC magazine on-line article <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1850851,00.asp> that reported AV-Test <http://www.av-test.org/> rating BitDefender as the best and ClamAV as the worst anti-virus software running on MS Windows. I thought ClamAV was the best anti-virus system. Could cygwin be part of the problem? Any comments? Anyone have an opinion about AV-Test.org? BitDefender has a free, closed source, version for Linux: <http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-63-en--BitDefender-Linux-Edition.htm l> Is BitDefender on Linux as good as BitDefender on MS Windows? Does anyone have experience with BitDefender on Linux? Sincerely, Ken Fuchs <kfuchs at winternet.com> P.S. I posted something similar thrice yesterday. Probably due to the lame Subject line and the repetition, most people ignored it. I apologize for wasting your time yesterday, but hope you will respond to this more carefully crafted post. Thank you! _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list