What antivirus program can I use on Ubuntu?

Question

Are there any antivirus applications that work on Ubuntu 16.04? Thanks!

Answer 1

As Rinzwind's answer explains the usefulness and necessity of such software is widely questioned.

However, should you decide your situation warrants it, you may want to know that Clam AV is a free open source antivirus toolkit designed for Linux/Unix systems. You can download the manual on the site.

It's available in Ubuntu repositories so you can install it with:

sudo apt install clamav

there is also a graphical front-end for it - Clam TK - this is optional, but you need clamav for clamtk to work. The devs describe it as:

An easy to use, light-weight, on-demand virus scanner for Linux systems

To get this too:

sudo apt install clamtk

Answer 2

"that work"

No.

All of the anti-virus programs for Linux are bogus. Those companies that own that software want you to spend money on them. That is it. Any warning by anti-virus software I myself (in 10+ years or so of using Linux and Unix) have seen have been bogus notices . Often those programs use Windows rules as a means to test Linux files. Never going to work.

There are no virusses in the wild that have Linux as a target. The only threat we have are rootkits and those are mostly installed to target a -specific- machine to gather information (think password for gaming sites, credit card details).

And since the software repositories is free from rootkits you will only get that installed if you install software from untrusted resource. In contrary to Windows users -we- do -not- do that.

The more important rules for Linux users ...

• Make sure your admin password is good enough.
• Make sure permissions are set correctly when you mess with them (if you host something yourself; like a website: never do a chmod 777).

Our systems are more likely to get hacked due to an easy to guess password.

The only reason to install a virus scanner is when you use your Linux box as a gateway to Windows machines where those Windows machines use a local mail system (Outlook) or are allowed to download software from any resource those users can find. Scanning those files for virusses and stopping them from getting to Windows systems is good practice. But this is more useful for companies and not a single user desktop. We desktop users connect Windows to the internet alongside our Linux machine and then you need a scanner on Windows.

Answer 3

There are a few available, but they are of little to no help on Linux. Starting from Clamtk, Avast and AVG to name a few. The only time I used one was for scanning viruses on my Windows partition. As long as you don't expose yourself to malware and rogue packages/scripts, you may not need it anytime soon. Since most of package management is handled by repositories.

More Info:

Why you may not need an antivirus on Linux

List of available antiviruses for Linux

Answer 4

You can choose between open source - clamav, which has clamtk gui, and closed source - nod32 from eset or avast - this one you might to find harder. The realtime scan is supported by nod, but check the compatibility with trial version.