Securing Your Data, the Open Source Way!

Sufyan bin Uzayr, Freelance Writer, Graphic Artist, Photographer, www.sufyan.co.nr

Antivirus and security solutions are like healthcare or medical insurances — you do not miss one until you wish you had one! As long as the person is healthy, healthcare investments seem to be burden, but when, or if, the same person falls ill, such investments come in handy. Similarly, security softwares do not make their presence felt; but in their absence, a lot of things can surely go wrong. As a result, many organizations do not prefer running the risk of trusting lesser known or 'open source' antivirus software and simply opt for the known names. But there is a set of anti-virus options available in the open source community that could be considered. Here are the noteworthy ones.

Clam Antivirus

No description of open source security options can be made without mentioning ClamAV. It does multiple things in one package—at the very crude level, it is a GPL-licensed antivirus engine that can be used by multiple applications and programs to fight viruses, trojan horses, spyware, malware and other threats. Further more, it can also be employed in mail gateway scanning, running multi-threaded scanning daemons and other command line utilities. The core ClamAV library comes loaded with file format detection, unpacking and archiving support and multilingual virus signatures. The prowess of the ClamAV engine can be adjudged from the fact that it powers IBM's Secure E-Mail Express Solution in part.

ClamAV has been well implemented into many solutions. For Windows users, there are options such as ClamWin Free Antivirus and Immunet 3.0 — the former comes with a dedicated version for enterprises and is absolutely free to use while the latter's enterprise equivalent is the 'Plus' version that, though free to use, is backed by paid support. For Mac users, the counterpart software is ClamXav 2, but it does not offer a separate enterprise version. And of course, it goes without saying that ClamAV is also available in multiple variants for Linux machines, both in personal and enterprise versions.

Links:

www.clamav.net (ClamAV engine home page)

www.clamwin.com (ClamAV for Windows)

www.clamxav.com (ClamAV for Mac)

VirusHammer

VirusHammer is an antivirus solution written in JAVA and can be run on any JAVA-enabled platform. While it offers a good level of protection and is absolutely free to use, from an organizational perspective, ClamAV should be preferred over VirusHammer as the former seems to be more active in terms of activity and signature updates.

Link:http://www.openantivirus.org/virushammer.php

squid-vscan

squid-vscan scans all incoming and outgoing traffic using the Squid HTTP-Proxy (http://www.squid-cache.org/).

Link:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10590&release_id=68273

samba-vscan

samba-vscan is a module of Samba which uses Virtual File System (VFS) to provide an on-access antivirus scanner for Samba. It natively supports and can co-exist with proprietary solutions such as F-Secure AV, Symantec AV, McAfee, Trend Micro and many others, along with open source ones like ClamAV.

samba-vscan caters predominantly to enterprise usage only and is also part of the enterprise release of SUSE Linux. The latest build of samba-vscan can be downloaded from www.openantivirus.org

Are they worth it?

Having discussed some of the most notable open source options in the security hemisphere, we can now ask: are these software worth it? Keeping it short, the answer is, Yes.

Essentially, an organization's investment in security solutions is governed by a simple cause: securing data from malicious threats. For an SME, this means no hassles of a virus or trojan attack and a tension-free productive environment. It is for this simple reason that enterprises invest in antivirus solutions.

Perhaps the most practical reason why businesses (or anyone for that matter) turns to open source is the considerable decline in cost that follows it. For instance, LibreOffice saves a lot of expenditure as compared to MS Office, and so on! Similarly, open source security solutions, apart from providing the necessary security measures, bring down the cost of maintenance considerably as compared to their proprietary counter parts.

However, an organization may be apprehensive about migrating to a lesser known open source solution. After all, you don't count on new horses to win the race, do you? Well, the above apprehension can best be attributed to proper propaganda. Strictly speaking, many proprietary antivirus programs are powered by open source engines (just as Apple's Mac OS evolved from UNIX). All the open source programs named in this article above are updated frequently on a regular basis. In fact, most web hosts and email services such as Fastmail.fm rely on ClamAV for protection.

If you do not wish to outrightly discard your primary antivirus program in favor of the open source alternatives, you can also consider certain custom made open source scripts and applets that offer specialized level of security, such as blocking certain IPs, access to websites or filtering email attachments. To know more about such open source security solutions, you may visit www. openantivirus.org