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.

    • JustinAEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I dont see how anything I said justifies you calling me names and calling me bad at my job. Chill out.

      Containers allow for more defense-in-depth, along with their multiple other benefits to maintability, updatability, reproducibility, etc. Sure, you can exploit the same RCE vuln on both traditional VMs and containers, but an attacker who gets shell access on a container is not going to be able to do much. There are no other processes or files that it can talk to or attack. There’s no obvious way for an attacker to gain persistence, since the file system is read-only, or at least everything will be deleted the next time the container is updated/moved. Containers eliminate a lot of options for attackers, and make it easier for admins to setup important security systems like firewalls and a update routine.

      Obviously containers aren’t always going to be the best choice for every situation, architecting computer systems requires taking into account a lot of different variables. Maybe your application can never be restarted and needs to have a more durable, VM solution. Maybe your application only runs on Windows. Maybe your team doesn’t have experience with kubernetes. Maybe your vendor only supplies VM images. But running your applications as stateless containers in Kubernetes solves a lot of problems that we’ve historically had to deal with in IT Operations, both technically and organizationally.

        • JustinAEnglish
          21·
          1 year ago

          I respectfully disagree. Containers are 100% the right choice in this situation. They provide the defense-in-depth and access controls that combat the threats that OP is targeting by using ClamAV.

          The goal isn’t securing a single database through a single attack vector. And it’s not like ClamAV would help you with that, either. The goal is preventing attackers from using your infra’s broad attack surface to get inside, and then persisting and pivoting to get to that database.

          It’s just not true that you can get the same level of security by running everything bare-metal, especially as a one-man, self-hosted operation.

            • JustinAEnglish
              21·
              1 year ago

              OP is asking for a guard dog to keep robbers from walking through their unlocked door. I’m telling OP to just lock their door and don’t bother with a guard dog.

            • JustinAEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I think Lemmy is glitching out here. My comment was a reply to a now deleted comment by just_another_person. It seems that after the comment was deleted, it messed up how the thread appears. Sorry for the confusion.