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Free Open Source Anti-Virus program.

Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2006 9:15 pm
by alcina
In the light of Andy's endorsement of Open Source products :) I thought I'd mention ClamAV...

It was written for unix (that's the "back end" but it has been converted for easy graphical use by other operating systems if you prefer), and is totally free (in the sense of "freedom of speech" *and* "free beer!"). We use it on some of our servers, and seems to be good and very adaptable. I've heard good things about the versions for desktop machines too.

Homepage is here: http://www.clamav.net If you run a posix unix (eg. OSX or Linux) you can install this and run it from the terminal, if you'd rather have a graphical front end then....
Windows version downloadable from here: http://www.clamwin.com/
Mac OSX version downloadable from here: http://www.clamxav.com/

Mac users please be aware that increasingly as Apple gains the market share, OSX is being targetd by virus writers. You have *never* been free of things like Microsoft Word macro viruses which are cross-platform, but now there are many more viruses being written specifically to infect OSX. Although the unix underbelly is (and I'm not just being biased here!) infinitely more secure than Windows, it's not perfect by any means and there *are* OSX viruses out there in the wild already. I know from experience!

Hope this helps

Alcina

Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2006 11:02 pm
by Andy Hamilton
I was wondering weatehr this would happen with apples recent rise in popualirity, down loaded the software now, nice link cheers.

Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2006 11:12 pm
by the.fee.fairy
Ta very muchly for this!!

My poor pooter's suffering terribly at the moment. It can't move without pop ups and other crap!

Fingers (and mouse wires) crossed this'll help!!

Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2006 8:28 pm
by alcina
Ah fee.fairy, that sounds like spyware rather than virus. Try Spybot Search And Destroy and Adaware.

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/

A combination of the two works quite well.

Alcina