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.
That’s what modern endpoint security is, really. Traditional AV is dead. There are far too many people making malware for file signatures or heuristics to keep up. Instead, you want to look for behavior on the system and on the network. For example, if a program starts reading every file it can find on the network, and changing then from their current formats to unreadable blobs, that’s probably ransomware and should be stopped. Plain old AV probably won’t catch it on the client because of how frequently it gets modified (plus all the various evasion techniques), nor on the server because nothing unusual is running on the server.