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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
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
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 ;)
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
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.