Scan Linux from Windows ?

I know Windows AV scanners will scan my Linux partition, what I want to know is if the AV will actualy work right while doing so....unpack, detection, removal.

 

Are you sure about this? You need to have ext2fs support in Windows to read the Linux filesystem.

 

No my friend, you'll need scanners made for linux.

 

They can't do that unless they have ext2fs mounted as a readable and writable drive, which windows normally can't do. In addition, there aren't really any antiviruses made for detecting linux viruses only. They are usually used in mail servers to scan mail for windows viruses

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

There are third-party drivers for that, but I'm not sure whether the poster knew about it and had them installed or not.

For sure.

 

Yes, thats why I said "I know Windows AV scanners will scan my Linux partition" I use This Works perfect on my ext3fs partiton. I also have NTFS read & write support in Linux.

I ran some test, downloaded some known virurs in various Linux folders. While in Win XP I scanned my Linux drive with Avast, AntiVir, Bitdefender and MWAVSCAN. All the AV's found the virus on the Linux drive, they also quarantined (except MWAV) or deleted the virus.

So the AV's that are for Linux, only detect windows virus ? don't they have any detection for things that might affect Linux ? If the "for Linux AV" does have detection for Linux germs, do the window AV's also include the Linux sigs ?

 

No, they will have signatures to detect multiple os viruses, however there are very very few viruses that currently affect *nix, thus most signatures are used to detect windows viruses. Likewise, windows antiviruses usually contain sigs for linux viruses since they are so few.

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

Not "only", but certainly "mostly".

There's really not much malware out there for Linux; the most common are probably rootkits, but I'm not sure how good are common AVs at detecting those. Frankly, I wouldn't count on AVs at all to detect malware on Linux. Use Tripwire: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/

 

Thanks to all

I was mainly interested because even though I have read & write access in Linunx for NTFS, I wasn't able to scan the windows drive with Linux F-Prot but was able to scan Linux from my windows drive.

TNT, thanks for the "Tripwire"