Re: How to - Scan a Windows machine for virus from a Linux machine

Ivan Aleman wrote:

> Each Windows machine have their AV (BitDefender) running and up to
> date and Ad-Ware scheduled to run twice a week. Still I would like to
> offer more protection by running an AV remotely from a dedicated
> machine.

Instead of wasting your time on trying to work out how to apply such 
after-the-fact band-aids via the network, spend some time learning how 
to properly configure and secure the machines themselves so the 
machines' users are not running with unnecessarily elevated privileges 
and cannot run any and every arbitrary executable they happen across.

If more folk actually tried doing this we would have systems with much 
better designed and implemented _from the ground up_ software.  If a 
s/w vendor tells you its "too hard" to write their crappy app properly 
so it works without (near-)admin privileges, hear that for what it 
really is -- "we are a bunch of lazy slobs who rather just take your 
money, and anyway, most of our other customers are too stupid to ask 
for that so why should we even consider 'doing the right thing' for 
you".  Sadly, _in the Windows market in articular_, this attitude to 
proper security considerations _from a product's initial design stage_ 
has been the (almost exclusively practised) norm to the point that most 
Windows system admins and users just accept that it is an intractible 
problem.

In fact, it's so deeply rooted (and in no small part directly because 
of MS' own historically ambivalent attitude to such issues) that MS has 
"solved" (hah!) many of the associated problems in Vista by 
virtualizing chunks of critical system resources so that vast gobs of 
the existing exceptionally crappily written crud that passes for 
"mission critical software" will actually work in its own little 
"sandbox" despite "least privilege" being the guiding light for the 
underlying OS default security configuration.


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald


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