I know that Linux is more secure than Windows and normally doesn’t need an antivirus, but know myself I’m gonna end up downloading something at some point from somewhere on the internet, and it would be good to be prepared. So, which antivirus would you recommend for Linux (Mint specifically) just to double up on security?
Why? Just use VirusTotal.
I think the security thing is very arguable at this point. Windows and macos are both extremely secure (from threats external to the companies that made them).
Linux still has heavy reliance on running install scripts as root. Flatpak avoids that but has its own issues. Docker has its own suite of issues. Snap is just issues.
Clamav is ok to use for scanning files for malware. If you want something to detect behavior you can use Falco or tetragon to log events on your system. Those systems are best used if you send them to centralized log system but that’s complete overkill for personal use
The best anti-virus is your brain.
No antivirus is needed if you know what you’re doing.
If you don’t, don’t do it or document yourself on.
If you don’t need on-access scanning - and just want manual scanning of individual files that you’ve downloaded before you execute them, you can use Lenspect (available on flathub) which submits files to virustotal.com https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.vmkspv.lenspect
I just want to add that you that you can also setup multiple user accounts for different uses. One for banking, one for gaming, one for downloading random crap. It will not protect against privilege escalation attacks but will help against random scripts exfiltrating your personal documents.
Another nice layer is containers and containerized applications (flatpaks, bubblewrap, etc). Each app will be somewhat limited in what damage it can do.
Running pi-hole as your DNS or using some other filtered DNS provider (Mulvad or others) will also protect you from some shady sites.
I would say there are not any worth recommending and that best practices are avoiding running random scripts you don’t understand, keeping software up to date with package managers, and using virtualization tools. Also look into Portmaster perhaps which is an interactive firewall.
Meta rant on this subject
What frustrates me about the answers these questions get is no one ever offers tools comparable to Windows tools, perhaps I think increasingly because they simply don’t exist outside of very expensive subscription enterprise offerings that require plunking down no less than a thousand dollars a year. (Certainly none of the major AV vendors offers consumer Linux versions of their software though most offer enterprise endpoint Linux that comes with the caveat of minimum spends of several hundred dollars if not several thousand a year)
ClamAV is primarily a definition AV, the very weakest and most useless kind. Sure it’s kind of useful to make sure your file server isn’t passing around year old malware but it’s basically useless for real time prevention of emerging and unknown threats. For that you needs HIPS, behavior control, conditional/mandatory access control, heuristics, etc. ClamAV has one of the worst detection rates in the industry. It’s just laughably bad (often under 60%) so it’s really not a front line contender at all.
Compare clam to consumer offerings with complex behavioral control like ESET, Kaspersky, etc that offered “suite” software that featured the aforementioned HIPS, behavioral control, complex heuristics to detect and in real time block malware-like behavior (for example accessing and then seeking to upload your keepass database files or starting to surreptitiously encrypt all your user files using RSA4096) and it just isn’t in the same ballpark as anything competently done in the last 20 years.
I haven’t used or relied on a traditional AV for definition detections for years. They’re worthless, it’s impossible to keep up. The AV’s I’ve deployed are for their heuristics, behavior control, HIPS, etc which actually stops new and emerging and unknown threats or at least puts real obstacles in their way. So what Linux needs, what users need is software like that, forget the traditional virus definitions, something with behavior control, HIPS, and some basic heuristics for “gee this sure looks like malware behavior, better ask the user whether they want and intend this”.
“Just be smart about what you run” isn’t a realistic solution when people say Linux is for everyone including their tech illiterate relatives. Yes, Linux is a lot safer if you just install things from package managers but that isn’t bulletproof either as we’ve seen a number of spectacular impact upstream malware insertions into build repos for huge software projects in recent years.
Just maintain back-ups isn’t helpful with smart cryptolocker software which may hide itself for weeks or months and encrypt your files as you back them up. Nor does it protect against account compromise from all your passwords being stolen or a keylogger. Nor does it defend you against persecution after being hit by mercenary/government police-ware and spyware from overreaching governments and makes the bar for them getting evidence you’re an illegal gay person or whatever that much lower technically in terms of capabilities.
Back-ups are disaster recovery. Everyone should have them but part of a layered defense is preventing the disaster and inconvenience and invasion of privacy and so on before it happens. Having your identity stolen or accounts taken over isn’t as simple as reverting to a back-up, it can result in hours, days of phone calls, emails, stress, hassle, etc that can drag on for weeks or months.
Portmaster is a start for this type of system control and protection as it’s a very effective interactive firewall but as far as I know there aren’t any consumer available comprehensive behavior control + HIPS type Linux desktop security solutions. There are several vendors of default deny mandatory access control with interactive mode for Windows but none offer solutions for Linux that aren’t part of enterprise sized contracts beyond affordability and reason. If anyone knows otherwise I would love to know of these solutions as I want to implement them on my Linux machines as I am not comfortable with just my network IPS and firewall solutions by themselves without comprehensive end-point security.
minimum spends
When you’re not on the car lot, the word is “budgets”.
DISCLAIMER
I am not a computer security expert, merely a hobbyist having read some blogs from people who sounded smart. It is more than probable that I am mistaken in one or more parts of this post.Linux is not more secure than Windows. By default, it’s actually considerably more vulnerable than Windows. Source
In my opinion an antivirus doesn’t really solve your problem. What you actually want is sandboxing, which means restricting user and program privileges. I recommend getting familiar with SELinux (or alternatively AppArmor, although it isn’t nearly as effective) and bubblewrap (or alernatively Firejail, which requires root privileges to run and is thus a bigger threat vector than bubblewrap).
Aside from that just disable any service you aren’t using (like ssh), use a deny-all-allow-some firewall, and verify what you download. If the link says “100% REAL 1 MILLION FREE ROBUX DOWNLOAD CLICK HERE NOW”, then maybe don’t click there.
Because even an antivirus won’t help you if you download malware, which isn’t compiled by skids who lifted the code from some darknet hacker forum. Antivirus isn’t some magical tool which makes your computer inherently more secure. Meaning you can’t offload your responsibilty to a program running with kernel level privileges. Your computer, your responsibilty.
P.S: If you want a more secure computer, I’d recommend a minimal and/or rolling release distro (openSUSE, Arch, Void, Debian) or FreeBSD/OpenBSD (BSD variants mitigate many of Linux’s inherent flaws).
If you’re careful and only install from the repo, you generally don’t need an AV. But if you do, ClamAV is the main AV on Linux. Installation tutorial for Mint: https://idroot.us/install-clamav-linux-mint-22/
Doesn’t ClamAV only check for Windows viruses that are passing through a Linux server?
No. ClamAV can, for example scan Linux ELF executables and its database contains signatures for malware that could affect desktop Linux. The most common use case is servers that are distributing files, but it can be used to scan local files.
The local use case is fairly rare because malware targeting desktop Linux is rare. That’s partly because Linux users tend to have a better understanding of computers on average than Windows users, and partly because the sort of attack vectors that work well against Windows users don’t align with Linux workflows (e.g. if you want to execute a file sent as an email attachment, you’ll have to save it and set it executable first).
I run ClamAV regularly, and it has not found anything on my several systems in the last 20 years. Good to know we’re safe, or are we?
I’m more concerned about rogue browser extensions that may be innocent when you install them, but then change owners, and after an update that you don’t even notice are going to do bad things.
I’m more concerned about rogue browser extensions that may be innocent when you install them, but then change owners, and after an update that you don’t even notice are going to do bad things.
Exactly why the only extensions on my browser are uBlock Origin and LibRedirect. Was a victim of one user agent switcher extension that went rogue back in the day.
Micheal Bazzel recommend ClamAV, havent tried it though
Ultimately, it’s going to be down to your risk profile. What do you have on your machine which would wouldn’t want to lose or have released publicly? For many folks, we have things like pictures and personal documents which we would be rather upset about if they ended up ransomed. And sadly, ransomware exists for Linux. Lockbit, for example is known to have a Linux variant. And this is something which does not require root access to do damage. Most of the stuff you care about as a user exists in user space and is therefore susceptible to malware running in a user context.
The upshot is that due care can prevent a lot of malware. Don’t download pirated software, don’t run random scripts/binaries you find on the internet, watch for scam sites trying to convince you to paste random bash commands into the console (Clickfix is after Linux now). But, people make mistakes and it’s entirely possible you’ll make one and get nailed. If you feel the need to pull stuff down from the internet regularly, you might want to have something running as a last line of defense.
That said, ClamAV is probably sufficient. It has a real-time scanning daemon and you can run regular, scheduled scans. For most home users, that’s enough. It won’t catch anything truly novel, but most people don’t get hit by the truly novel stuff. It’s more likely you’ll be browsing for porn/pirated movies and either get served a Clickfix/Fake AV page or you’ll get tricked into running a binary you thought was a movie. Most of these will be known attacks and should be caught by A/V. Of course, nothing is perfect. So, have good backups as well.
Nothing needs an antivirus if you backup your data properly.
PS: I’m getting downvoted for this so I’ll explain a bit more : if you backup properly, you can restore your data. Sure your system is fucked… but who cares? In fact if you care for your OS installation then right away it shows you are NOT in a reliable state. You install another OS and start from there. Maybe it’s not even due to a virus, maybe your hardware burns in fire, same situation so IMHO a working backup (and by working I mean rolling, like TODAY it’s done without your intervention) then you restore. Also please don’t tell me about ransomware because even though it is a real threat, if you do your backups properly (as in not overwritting the old ones with the new ones) then you are still safe. It can be as basic as using
rdiff-backup. It’s fundamental to understand the difference between what’s digital and what is not digital.And you don’t need a seat belt if you drive good
Funny but that’s the entire point of a digital “life” if you want to use analogies : your backup is you.
There are viruses that are time-bombs. They specifically don’t do really do anything until some criteria is met in the future, such as the current date being beyond a specific date, at which point they proc. They do this in order to make sure they are in your backups when you restore them so that they immediately run when recovery is completed and the system is booted.
That doesn’t make much sense to me, one backup data, not executables or system. Even if they were to be saved in the backup then they wouldn’t get executed back.
Anyway, that’s still conceptually interesting but it’s so very niche I’d be curious to hear where it’s being used, any reference to read on where those exist in the wild?
They usually embed themselves in within the system files and have some scheduled job that basically checks for the criteria - if you are only backing up and restoring user data then it’s a non-issue, but if you do a full recovery including the system files/the system scheduler etc, then it can happen, and it is often necessary to backup executable and system files for production environments (true, not so much for individual users and their systems).
When I was working in an IT shop, one of our clients was ransomwared with this method. The saving grace for us in that instance is that our backups were going to a product that allowed you to easily break open and dissect the compressed backups pre-recovery, so we were able to determine where the malicious files were and kill them before pushing the backups. Of course we only noticed that it was in the backups after we had tried to push the backups once already, so it was quite the timely process - I think I worked for something like 18 hours that day.
You can read about such malware if you search for “timebomb malware” or “malware does not execute until date” etc.
The attack is not super common anymore, but still happens.
For example, here is an article discussing time bomb methods on linkedin.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-bombs-malware-delayed-execution-any-run
Another on the knowbe4 blog:
https://blog.knowbe4.com/ransomware-can-destroy-backups-in-four-ways
Thanks, it’s quite interesting but again IMHO it relies on bad practices. If you’ve been compromised and you “restore” (not in an sandboxed environment dedicated to study the threat) then you are asking for trouble. I’ll read a bit more in depth but the timeline I see 1987, 1998, 2017 show me this is a very very niche strategy, to the point that it’s basically irrelevant. Again it’s good to know of it, conceptually, but in practice proper backups (namely of data) remains in my eyes the best way to mitigate most problems, attacks and just back luck (failing hardware, fire, etc) alike.
Oh for sure - I think that this method has more efficacy in production environments ran by small businesses anyway, since best practices are rarely followed in many of them (until something happens that changes their mind on what they budget for haha), and even at that it is still a rare attack to see.
I am unaware of this type of attack ever occurring on a persons personal network, most likely because so few end users make backups, there is no need to go through the trouble of doing this, making this method useful only in highly targeted attacks.
We are definitely in agreement on proper backups still being the best method to recover from the vast majority of problems - even this one, depending on the backup solution.
