TL;DR - What are you running as a means of “antivirus” on Linux servers?
I have a few small Debian 12 servers running my services and would like to enhance my security posture. Some services are exposed to the internet and I’ve done quite a few things to protect the services and the hosts. When it comes to “antivirus”, I was looking at ClamAV as it seemed to be the most recommended. However, when I read the documentation, it stated that the recommended RAM was at least 2-4 gigs. Some of my servers have more power than other but some do not meet this requirement. The lower powered hosts are rpi3s and some Lenovo tinys.
When I searched for alternatives, I came across rkhunter and chrootkit, but they seem to no longer be maintained as their latest release was several years ago.
If possible, I’d like to run the same software across all my servers for simplicity and uniformity.
If you have a similar setup, what are you running? Any other recommendations?
P.S. if you are of the mindset that Linux doesn’t need this kind of protection then fine, that’s your belief, not mine. So please just skip this post.
Zero days aren’t the only way you get viruses. Misconfiguration and social engineering are both vectors that are OS agnostic.
But do antivirus really help with that? Is it going to check for open ports and see if the service listening has a strong password?
You can’t program against social engineering or missconfiguration, and because those are the only real vulnerabilities in Linux there’s no need for antivirus.
No but it can’t do that on Windows either, all it can do is detect an infection and attempt to remove it. Same process would be applicable on Linux.
