virus scan programs

[Jim Durham]

On Friday 05 September 2003 12:32 pm, Lee_Shackelford at dot.ca.gov 
wrote:
> Dear freeBSD enthusiast,
>      Greetings.  I am a newcomer to the BSD/Unix world.  My place
> of employment is a large agency with thousands of client machines. 
> Most of the clients use Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
> operating system.  Most of the servers use either Novell operating
> system, or I.B.M. Domino operating system.  A very important ritual
> that each client computer performs every morning at boot-up time is
> to run a virus scan application program.  This program is run
> whether or not the user desires it, because it runs before the user
> us granted a log-on screen.  In my reading of Unix and BSD
> literature, I have found no mention of virus scan programs for
> these operating systems.  Do such programs not exist? Alternately,
> is the Unix/BSD approach to this problem in a different
> philosophical and/or procedural sphere?  If so, could you describe
> the Unix/BSD approach to locating and eradicating these invaders of
> one's hard drive?  If the issue is already explained in either
> printed literature, or posted at a world wide web site, it is
> sufficient to cite the location.  Many thanks for your response.

As mentioned by others, *nix systems are highly virus-imune and also 
most viruses are written for Windows.

Sophos is one virus software supplier that has a native freebsd 
version of their virus scanning engine. (www.sophos.com).

If you wished to scan for viruses at system boot time, you could put a 
startup script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d to start Sophos sweep.

There are other virus software companies that support *nix, but Sophos 
was one that I know has a FreeBSD version.

-Jim