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Virus Prevention in the Small/Medium Business?
Morti asks: "I've been asked to select a virus scanner to be installed on the network at work. It's only a small office with six Windows XP PCs, two Linux servers and any number of Windows XP laptops that random people bring in. And I'm wondering, not just in this case but generally, what is the virus scanning / Internet security solution of choice for the small business these days? Costs need to be kept at a minimum, particularly because this business is a registered charity (a church, no less). We used to have Norton Internet Security but I'm not really keen to keep it. Besides Linux (which I've been pushing but nobody's interested), what is the most cost-effective and generally 'best' virus prevention and Internet security solution for the small/medium business?"
Small, reliable and free.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
oops, forgot to check "Plain old text"
here it is again with line breaks that make sense.
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You could install an active scanner, like mcaffee or norton, on all of the machines, though this can become a headache with the machines not updating often enough. This should be done anyway.
You could also use passive scanners that are stand-alone apps that you click on and run periodically to clean viruses. This is typically the cheapest, and also by far the least reliable as it requires users to do it every once in awhile (assuming of course that you don't ant to run around to all the machines yoruself).
You could also use clamav to filter just about anywhere. Squid has a plug-in for monitoring web-traffic, amavisd-new uses it for mail filtering, and Samba can use it for scanning incoming files on file shares (this catches a lot of viruses that try to copy themselves to available shares, ie Klez).
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
We are a school, and pay about $17/year per machine for Corporate Edition 10. A non-profit church should be similar.
Pluses are, it now scans for malware, (thank god!), and is pretty automated.
Minuses, I spent 35 minutes on hold on their "Enterprise support line" to get a guy to give me a username/password to download the newest build, as the one we are using crashes randomly. (why on earth do they not have an automated update functionality for the program itself?) Also requires a server, and can slow down systems quite a bit.. (uses 25MB of Ram, and 27MB of swap just sitting Idle right now on my box)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I used to recommend McAfee. And then they started writing crap software. So I started recommending Norton. And then THEY started writing crap software. I use AVG at home and I'd recommend it without hesitation to home users. But the best Anti-virus on the planet at the moment is humble NOD32. It consistently scores above all the others, catches more viruses and returns fewer false positives. It's not too expensive, either. About $35-$40 a seat (US).
On the Linux side, I'd recommend AntiVir. It works. You might be asking why you'd need anti-virus on a Linux box. If it's serving files to Windows clients, it can still CARRY the viruses even if it can't be infected. It's best to have the server side covered if at all possible in case a workstation misses something.