Best free firewall and antivirus for Linux?

JustPassingBy

Lady_K wrote: »

So do you think its ok to just instal an antivirus and keep the inbuilt firewall as it is then?

It would help people to help you if we knew which Linux distribution is on the machine. However, all major distributions adopt a similar approach to security so you will very comforted to know that the notebook will have been set up not to accept any connections from the internet. That means there is no way for anyone (other than the person at the keyboard) to access any data on the hard disk. In this situation a firewall is redundant and time spent configuring one is time wasted.

Your granddaughter would be best advised to stick with the packages provided by her distribution. Any decent distribution has a way of updating the machine over the internet. Updating pulls in security fixes and doing it regularly is essential.

I don't think she will do the avast scan manually, I use avast myself but perhaps for her it would be better to use one that runs at a set time everyday. Which would you recommend?

Neither.

Every so often people point to lists of so-called viruses for Linux. Regardless of whether they ever worked in the first place it is the case that none of them will run on a modern Linux installation. Why waste time and effort in protecting against a threat which does not exist?

superscaper

JustPassingBy wrote: »

Every so often people point to lists of so-called viruses for Linux. Regardless of whether they ever worked in the first place it is the case that none of them will run on a modern Linux installation. Why waste time and effort in protecting against a threat which does not exist?

Hope you're not going to get picky about defining a virus. I've seen first hand a modern linux installation hacked and malicious code implanted onto it. Caused our company loads of hassle. Whether it was technically a virus or not it was still malicious and there was nothing we could have done to prevent it and it certainly demonstrates that merely using linux isn't "absolutely secure".

Lady_K

I will try find out which linux distribution it is and if there is a slight chance of anything malicious occuring I'd rather be safe than sorry, having an antivirus on wont really do any harm so its probably better to have one.

Can anyone confirm that the inbuilt firewall updates itself without the need to do anything or will she need to do this?

Can anyone recommend which antivirus to put on that scans automatically at a set time please?

JustPassingBy

superscaper wrote: »

Hope you're not going to get picky about defining a virus. I've seen first hand a modern linux installation hacked and malicious code implanted onto it. Caused our company loads of hassle. Whether it was technically a virus or not it was still malicious and there was nothing we could have done to prevent it and it certainly demonstrates that merely using linux isn't "absolutely secure".

Medical practitioners tend to be picky about diagnosing colds, influenza and pneumonia . It influences planning prevention, a treatment or a cure.

A Linux machine with no incoming connections accepted and up-to-date packages is made no safer with a firewall and antivirus software on it. Having used Debian exclusively on all my machines for over ten years I've yet to experience anything which would comes close to a breach in security.

fwor

Lady_K wrote: »

Can anyone confirm that the inbuilt firewall updates itself without the need to do anything or will she need to do this?

The code of the firewall that's built into most Linux variants (iptables) should be automatically updated if any bugs need to be patched, but customising the rule set is the user's responsibility. In many distros the default rule set is very simple - allow anything outbound, deny everything inbound, and for the "average" domestic user that's fine. It may need mods for things like peer-to-peer, but that probably won't be relevant for your daughter.

TBH I wouldn't bother with AV. SS is quite right that Linux is not free of malware, but the overwhelming majority will be aimed at things like web servers, forum software and online business applications, which won't apply to her.

If you must, Ubuntu for example has ClamAV built into the repositories, so you can just add it. I just tried it and it took about 2 minutes to install. However, it doesn't appear to have any scheduler, and it's got those "traditional" Linux quirks - e.g. if you try to update the virus signature database it says "you must be root to do this". Not hard to overcome if you're familiar with Linux, but a pain if you're a novice...

Robin_T_Cox

There's a useful guide to security for new Ubuntu users (from the Ubuntu forums) at:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=510812