Antivirus?

[Grant]

Matthew Seaman wrote:

>On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 01:44:26PM +0100, Grant wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I was just wondering this morning, do i really need antivirus? the 
>>reason i thought that was because i run only linux and freebsd boxes and 
>>i heard that there is very limited virus's that can affect/infect a 
>>bsd/linux box...
>>    
>>
>
>The only widespread Linux viruses I ever heard of infected webservers
>via a buggy version of OpenSSL -- that was the Slapper worm, and
>related things like the Ramen worm.  Similarly the Scalper worm would
>infect FreeBSD/Apache servers using an apache version vulnerable to
>the chunked transfer encoding problem (ie Apache 1.3.20 - 1.3.24) --
>and that is apparently the one and only known trojan to infect
>FreeBSD.  None of those trojans are a serious problem currently.
>
>To my knowledge there has never been a virus of trojan that can infect
>either of those two OSes and that spreads via e-mail.  Which is almost
>the same thing as saying that MS Outlook or Outlook Express doesn't
>run on those platforms.
> 
>  
>
>>So i was wondering do i really need to install them virus filters on my 
>>mail server? or on any of my bsd/linux boxes, if i do could someone 
>>explain why....
>>    
>>
>
>You can probably get away without any sort of virus filtering on your
>unix based mail servers at the moment. Even so, I think it's worth
>doing AV filtering just to get rid of the virus generated spam traffic
>relatively efficiently.  Pick out the virus stuff by recognising
>signatures, and let your more computationally expensive Bayesian
>filters concentrate on the other stuff.
>
>	Cheers,
>
>	Matthew
>
>  
>
Thanks for the quick response all!

I do offer a few users that use windows, email accounts.... but i will 
suggest they grab something their end to solve that problem, and as 
someone said install something to get rid of the virus spam...

Also what is this "rootkit attacks" could someone expand of that for 
me... oh and what i might need to protect myself from them...

Thanks.
Grant.

ps = i think i might give "ClamAV" a wiz... would anyone be able to test 
it for me once its installed?