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What are the best Malware/Spyware/Antivirus solutions?

Several requirements for the solution:

  • Open Source or Freeware
  • Centralized Management
  • Reporting and Remote Installation

Think spybot / malwarebytes / highjackthis for business.

I am not interested in Symantec, Trend, McAfee, SonicWALL or any other commercial products.

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5 Answers 5

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AFAIK, there isn't a package than answers to all your requirements. Best Open Source AV package i know is ClamAV, and it doesn't have much, if any reporting and remote control/installation, and no centralized management. You can circumvent these problems by developing a scripted management and RIS environment. Shouldn't be too hard assuming you already have an infrastructure for some of it.

In general, (musing here) virus databases require constant updates, and it's a lot of boring hard work, I guess - not the ideal grazing field for bored open source developers. I wouldn't trust my corporate infrastructure to an anti virus that's updated by volunteer work, especially as the proprietary AV packages aren't THAT expensive, and the ClamAV antivirus really didn't score that high on any of the AV comparison tests.

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Avira Free AV is great and lightweight.

www.avira.com

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I've been more or less happy with Symantec Corp's Multi-point protection. It included coverage for the workstations and also the exchange server including anti-virus and anti-spam (very effective anti-spam)

Down side is the workstation anti-virus clients are becoming somewhat bloated, so if you have really old workstations or not much memory in them you'll notice they will seem slower. But it runs great on our newer ones, and we only get low end Dell's with 1 gig of ram.

You can even push out the installation of the client using Symatec's own deployment tool from the server. Worked great so you can completely control it from one server. Your subscription includes the defination updates for all clients, the mail server and phone support for a year.

They have some pretty good volume discounts as well.

Sorry I miss read the part where you said you didn't want commerical products, I thought it said those were ok to. That said, if you don't find anything in the open source (I never did that met those needs) you might still want to consider it.

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I can avise comodo internet security, it's a complete professional system and freeware

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This not a solution to your problem, but we use McAfee 8.5i and I have to say that it is unbelievably bloated. We have almost 200 machines and McAfee is the culprit 100 percent of the time when I notice them experiencing extreme slowdowns. It may be important to note that these machines all have decent, but not great, specs. If you are going to run McAfee you will notice issues even with 2 gigs of ram. I have refused to run it on my new laptop.

The free alternatives still experience some bloating. I have successfully run AVG on an older machine and experienced only minimal interference. I have also tried Comodo and Avast recently. I always try to configure them for minimal interference, but I am not sure if that actually helps or not.

I even have a machine (with decent specs) that I don’t run AV on at all. It’s strictly a Photoshop machine, and although I don’t recommend it, I have found that with some experience and common sense it is possible to get by without protection on certain machines.

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