Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Acquires RAV Antivirus
Webmoth writes "Microsoft has announced the assimilation of RAV Antivirus from GeCAD Software of Romania. This is significant, because RAV Antivirus was one of the few antivirus products that provided cross-platform email virus scanning and spam filtering, integrating with sendmail and postfix on Linux (among others). No word yet on the impact to non-Microsoft users. In the process, they've left RAE Internet, the (former) exclusive U.S. distributor of RAV Antivirus, along with a host of authorized resellers, in the dust."
Good probability ... although Symantec currently has a great product for corporate use, (see it here) including Exchange mail filtering/virus scanning (Symantec AVF), and server/client management utilities that are great (Symantec AV Corporate Edition) that have proven very useful to our business in the past. I think Microsoft would be in for some tough competition, unless of course they bully Symantec out of the job.
the blood has stopped pumping, and he's left to decay
the me that you know is now made up of wires
Scanning email for specific viruses is overkill. This solution stops more viruses (read: all of them) with far fewer system resources:
http://qmail.org/qmail-smtpd-viruscan-1.0.patch
Go Check out Frisk Software's F-PROT for Linux and FreeBSD.
Good stuff.
Avast at http://www.avast.com/index.html
:)
Using it on my Windows XP box and I'm very happy with it, apart from the scary siren and ladies voice that shouts "Warning, Virus Detected" and scares the crap out of you when you're not expecting it
They have a Beta Version for Linux for download.
Jonathan
MSFT can aquire a company and *not* integrate it into windows you know.... So no, provided they don't bundle it with windows it isn't anti-competitive.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Thank God I chose to buy Sophos licenses instead of RAV. For anyone who's looking to replace RAV (on linux, bsd, whatever) check out Sophos. They support a plethora of operating systems, hopefully they won't get bought by M$ too ;)
- The website specifies that the free edition of AVG Anti-Virus "can not" (doesn't specify whether it can not or may not - I find the latter more likely) be installed on servers, or in any networked environment.. The Internet is a network, so technically, you can't use this if your computer has an Internet connection. You also can't use it when your computer is connected to a LAN of any kind. I personally don't own any computers that aren't.
- The EULA for the free edition allows only one copy per user and PC, and only on home or "non-commercial organization" computers. So if you have two computers, you can only run AVG on one, and you can't run it at work.
- You are required to submit to AVG a large amount of personal information in order to download the software. You're also forced to submit a valid e-mail, which I understand is considered a problem considering the large amount of whining every time Slashdot links to NYT. God only knows what they'll use all that personal information for - I wouldn't trust them not to sell it.
Let it be noted that I'm in no way naive enough to believe that everyone who downloads AVG Anti-Virus will actually bother with following the terms of the EULA. I just felt that this was worthy of pointing out, since the parent poster only gave half the story about AVG.I personally use McAfee VirusScan, which I'm very pleased with. I lost all trust in Norton products some time ago when I bought (yes bought) their AV software and it broke Windows XP (something very easily done, I admit). Even after they fixed it, Norton AV seemed really slow and bloated. Sorry, I'd rather use those 30 megs of RAM for something else. By comparison, VirusScan's background service uses 8 megs, and I can never tell it's there unless it's found a virus (which rarely happens as I don't run untrusted binaries).
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
another alternative is MailScanner with any of these AV programs
Sophos, McAfee, F-Prot, Command, Kaspersky, Inoculate, Inoculan, Nod32, F-Secure, Panda, RAV, Antivir, ClamAV, Vscan.
Installs basically as a drop in for exim, Postfix, sendmail and ZMailer.
I've been using this with sendmail and the free for personal use version of F-Prot.
it keeps the (possibly multiple) attached AV scanners updated and has internal support for SpamAssassin.
We've had tremendous success with McAfee on our Red Hat boxes, using AMaViS to glue it to sendmail.
You know the old saying: when life throws you a curve ball, make lemonade. Or something like that.
I think we all agree that we like multi-platform virus scanning. This just goes to show the biggest advantage of free software: no one can ever take it away from you.
If Microsoft decides to, they can terminate all versions of this product but the Windows versions. If we can get a really effective free alternative, that can never happen. (The very worst thing that can happen is slow updates to the virus definitions.)
I have always thought that anti-virus software was an ideal candidate for free software. Non-coders can easily contribute: whenever they find a virus that the scanner doesn't know, just send it in. (They can find the virus either by using a payware virus scanner, such as Norton Antivirus, or they can find it the hard way by getting it. However they find it, they can send it in.)
Heck, I'd be willing to keep one machine with Windows on it, running Norton, and also run the free scanner on it, just to help out the community.
So, is there a free virus scanner? Yes. Two, actually.
First came OpenAntiVirus. But that project's virus database was last modified in October 2002. The better alternative is ClamAV.
ClamAV is available for a whole bunch of platforms, including Linux and FreeBSD. It can be set up to scan mail on servers. There is a library you can use to add antivirus scanning to your own applications (maybe OpenOffice should do that?).
I hope that lots of people will start running ClamAV, even just as a test project. Remember that you can put ClamAV on as many computers as you want, for free, but you can still buy a few payware virus scanners to hedge your bets if you want to.
If lots of people run ClamAV, and send in viruses that it misses, it should be able to find all the viruses that the payware can find.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
RAV was one of the few virus scanners for Linux mail servers that was actually affordable. $300 bucks for 2 domains and then like $50 per year for virus updates.
.2 average load on a P2 300 scanning email for around 3000 users.
It was very fast,
Plus it has content filtering and an anti-spam module that cut my users spam in half.
My users love it, but I can't afford the thousands of dollars other solutions cost.
I've been using clamav for virus scanning since it appeared in Debian unstable. It is used by amavisd-new for virus scanning and with spamassassin for spam scanning of my incoming (and outgoing) email. Amavisd-new is then integrated with postfix and cyrus-imapd (2.1.x) for my mail server. Works like a champ on a Power Mac 8600/200 with 512MB RAM!
The only problem with using clamav is that it needs more mirrors to distribute the virus definitions. The main virus definition download site was down over this past weekend, I'm guessing because of the BugBear.B worm.
You are wrong. If you care to read what it says in the Add/Remove WIndows Components box, you would have read that it specifically states that it would only add or remove access to Windows Messenger from the Start Menu.
You could also have used Microsoft Support to find out about this KB article that explains how to use the Policy editor to prevent it from running.
Switching to linux doesn't bother me. What bothers me is your disinformation, which won't help anyone.