Hi,
Has anyone seen a review or install this new antivirus from Microsoft that now support Linux?
I was kind of under the impression that an antivirus was really not needed for Linux.
Your opinion.
Thanks
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is there anything about viruses in particular that you are concerned about?
here is one write-up i found that gives a bit more information.
my take on windows releasing defender for linux and other platforms is mostly about an attempt to increase market share. of course embrace, extend and extinguish is also a possibility (also this).
my thought on virus protection in general (gathered from various sources) is that since the vast majority of installed software comes from distro repos as long as you trust your distro you trust the packages they are serving you are safe. articles like this (whether you agree with the choice or not) highlight the fact that distro maintainers/developers take a keen interest in what they include. add to that the fact that you need root (at least sudo) authentication to make most system changes means you will have to ok something that wants to make such a change.
for the first couple of years on linux i installed clamav on my systems, but found myself running it less and less until eventually i just didn’t install it once and never really looked back.
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ClamAV is the standard anti-virus software one may run on Linux. It is being used in enterprise environments, however even then only when you want to take every security measure possible.
Generally, one does not need an anti-virus for Linux based operating systems.
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I am with akito on this
Been using Linux for around 20 years and never seen a virus, with over 400 installed client machines.
Did have a couple who demanded a antivirus even though I assured them not needed, so put clamav on just to show and reassure. But never had one back with that type of issue.
Had to use clamav on Mac as a virus tool (although it’s called something else and could be to pay for) and works really well.
On Windows 10 now I only use and recommend defender for protection. But need other tools when get problems as it’s not 100 % reliable. I only see clients when they have problems so then it’s remove avg, avast, and other such tools that have failed, out with superantispyware, and malwarebytes, a touch of ccleaner … after all this I know why I changed to Linux.
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Like some of the other writers, I ran ClamAV for years. It found malware on only one occasion and what it found was a couple of MS .doc files that had been tampered with. The only vulnerability was if I sent the files to someone who then used them in Windows. The exploit wouldn’t run in Linux.
And, also like the others, I no longer bother with this.
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My only comment is during the test phase I could not get Defender to run under Linux. M$ had me do this and that but I saw it as very invasive and finally gave up and removed it. It was quite the process. And it always wanted to send data to M$ according to my Firewall.
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Strikes me as absurd, somebody looking for another way to make some money.
I too have been running Linux non-stop for 20 years and never seen a virus. The only reason for antivirus on Linux is if you’re using it to run services for Windows lusers. 
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Thats because their is so few made for linux and were years ago but as linux becomes more popular they will catch up. A security tip... Creat 2 accounts but only one administrator and done use unless you have to just use the restricted one for day to day use->>This comes from a professional hacker not me.For additional security-privacy use 2 browsers one for social media-shopping the other for day to day use. If AV is what you think you need Dr.Web is the best they are from russia and powered Stop Sign AV years ago & was the best on the market, most likely to good thats why you can`t find it anymore.
Only time I’ve seen viruses on a Linux/UNIX system, was on my FreeNAS box, in a Samba share, put there by a Windows computer… it was easy to get rid of, it created *.exe files with the same name as the parent folder, with a folder icon (and repeated everytime you double clicked on the exe file, thinking it was a folder), but they all had the same checksum - so I just wrote a cronjob to look for them and delete them…
I did once setup and install a virus scanner on UNIX (Solaris) - ths Sun box was a sendmail relay/MTA (for a hideous Groupwise setup - I kinda hate Microsoft, but Exchange even back then was way ahead of Groupwise), so I used Computer Associates virus scanner binary for sparc there to intercept ALL mail and attachments and scan them, it was free to use…
I don’t run any virus scanner on my Linux desktops… don’t see the need… I may regret that one day… I may rethink this is if Linux desktop market share grows significantly in the next ~5 years…
I remember working with a Mac guru in 1996, and he told me that for the first time ever, there’d been no new Mac viruses for 6 months! This was when Apple was in serious trouble, losing market share exponentially, and as the Apple (Power and motorola 68K) target for virus writers shrunk, they stopped writing new ones… then a bit later on that year, Apple re-hired Jobs, merged with NexT (which Tim Berners-Lee used to create the WWW) and Microsoft injected $150 million cash - thus Apple survived…
Now of course, with 10% or so market share on the desktop, there are lots of trojoans and malware for Mac, but viruses? I’m sure it became “easier” when Apple switched to Intel CPU’s…
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@community
Having antivirus on Linux is something ridiculous in my opinion because its lot more secure than Windows and Mac .
If you take security measures and be cautious no one is going to harm you not even monkeys are going to harm yoir system meaning Black Hat Hackers
Such as updating your system
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DNS poisoning is more my concern. Would Clam AV be a viable virus scanner to check downloads.
Installing enterprise grade anti-virus and intrusion detection and prevention software on to Linux (I’m talking servers) creates more problems than it’s attempting to solve…
I recently did an all nighter on a “tech bridge” (like a “Zoom” session with all the parties participating - but using WebEx) precisely because a fleet of mission critical Red Hat servers, continually crashed X number of minutes after being patched, and the finger of blame was the anti-virus software… i.e. the “offshore” engineers decided it was a good idea to patch BOTH the O/S and the anti-virus at the same time in the same window, and their backout wasn’t “restore” to previous state, but to watch the grub loader on the virtual console (VMware ESX) and manually select the previous kernel - hideously unscientific.
Before patching mission critical servers - TAKE A VMWARE SNAPSHOT! That’s so easy!
At the first sign of trouble - backout EVERYTHING to the VMWARE SNAPSHOT!
Oh well… No longer my problem…