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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers howto Post 40571 by Perderabo on Thursday 18th of September 2003 07:58:11 AM
Old 09-18-2003
Unix is a collection of operating systems that run on any hardware. Unix people rarely download executables except from very trusted sources.

Windows users will download executables very frequently and virtually all of them use a cpu that uses intel's instruction set.

True viruses are machine specific. So you can create a SunOS true virus or an HP-UX true virus. But a unix true virus cannot be written.

The first internet based attack was the morris worm which targeted several versions of unix simultaneously. It took down many unix based systems. It even crossed over to Milnet and took down hundreds of military systems. That was well over 10 years ago and unix security has improved a lot since then.

Unix tends to treat email as something for a human to read. It is very rare for a unix system to attempt to execute an incoming email message automatically. It also helps that there are other operating systems that are very vulnerable to viruses. They divert the attention of virus authors away from unix. Finally, unix still has several security problems of its own. A cracker who wants to breech unix security will target one of those.

These are the big factors that act to protect unix from viruses. True viruses that is....

However, people use the term virus loosely. I know the difference between a virus and a worm. However, I would not be amused if the virus scanning software that I bought for my laptop intentionally ignored worms.

And evil software doesn't always perfectly match the classical definitions. Those email viruses that target windows are not true viruses. But it's not clear what to call them... they are sort of a cross between a trojan horse and a worm or something.

Now consider your mail server: if an email virus targeted toward Windows arrives on your server, it will not magically disappear. Sure, it won't affect your unix based mail server. That doesn't mean that you want to forward it to your user's computer. I would call a unix mail server waiting to download windows viruses "infected". What other term would you use? (Actually, I kinda like the term "subclinical infection".)

So unix can be infected with anything and after you loosen up the definition of "virus" enough to include all evil software, unix can be affected by viruses.

As for antispam, click on home, then click on answers to frequently asked questions, then click on email antispam techniques and email filtering
 

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Clamd client(1) 						  Clam AntiVirus						   Clamd client(1)

NAME
clamdscan - scan files and directories for viruses using Clam AntiVirus Daemon SYNOPSIS
clamdscan [options] [file/directory] DESCRIPTION
clamdscan is a clamd client which may be used as a clamscan replacement. It accepts all the options implemented in clamscan but most of them will be ignored because its scanning abilities only depend on clamd. OPTIONS
-h, --help Display help information and exit. -V, --version Print version number and exit. -v, --verbose Be verbose. --quiet Be quiet - only output error messages. --stdout Write all messages (except for libclamav output) to the standard output (stdout). --config-file=FILE Read clamd settings from FILE. -l FILE, --log=FILE Save the scan report to FILE. -f FILE, --file-list=FILE Scan files listed line by line in FILE. -m, --multiscan In the multiscan mode clamd will attempt to scan the directory contents in parallel using available threads. This option is espe- cially useful on multiprocessor and multi-core systems. If you pass more than one file or directory in the command line, they are put in a queue and sent to clamd individually. This means, that single files are always scanned by a single thread. Similarly, clamdscan will wait for clamd to finish a directory scan (performed in multiscan mode) before sending request to scan another direc- tory. This option can be combined with --fdpass (see below). --remove Remove infected files. Be careful. --move=DIRECTORY Move infected files into DIRECTORY. --no-summary Do not display summary at the end of scanning. --reload Request clamd to reload virus database. --fdpass Pass the file descriptor permissions to clamd. This is useful if clamd is running as a different user as it is faster than streaming the file to clamd. Only available if connected to clamd via local(unix) socket. --stream Forces file streaming to clamd. This is generally not needed as clamdscan detects automatically if streaming is required. This option only exists for debugging and testing purposes, in all other cases --fdpass is preferred. EXAMPLES
(0) To scan a one file: clamdscan file (1) To scan a current working directory: clamdscan (2) To scan all files in /home: clamdscan /home (3) To scan a file when clamd is running as a different user: clamdscan --fdpass ~/downloads (4) To scan from standard input: clamdscan - <file_to_scan cat file_to_scan | clamdscan - RETURN CODES
0 : No virus found. 1 : Virus(es) found. 2 : An error occured. CREDITS
Please check the full documentation for credits. AUTHOR
Tomasz Kojm <tkojm@clamav.net> SEE ALSO
clamd(8), clamd.conf(5), clamscan(1) ClamAV 0.96.1 February 12, 2009 Clamd client(1)
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