 Do you need an antivirus program on Linux? That's the topic for the day. Many new to Linux users, when they first switch from especially windows over to Linux, they start looking around their new Linux distribution. They just installed Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Fedora or whatever Linux distribution they just installed. And they immediately start looking through all the programs that are available on this distribution. And they start looking for an AV program, an antivirus program. And typically you're not gonna find one on most Linux distributions. They don't ship with antivirus programs installed because it's really not necessary on Linux. We're gonna get into that a little deeper, but obviously Windows users are used to antivirus being a way of life, right? You're constantly scanning your system. You have this active scan that's always going on on this Windows system looking for new viruses that somehow magically appear on your computer on Windows. And a lot of Mac users, one of the interesting things is Mac users typically don't run antivirus programs either. Many years ago, one of the big selling points for the Mac operating system was the fact that unlike Windows, Mac was kind of immune to viruses that all these viruses that are out there in the wild, they're typically written, of course, for Windows machines. They're written in such a way to infect Windows computers. So these Windows viruses, they really don't work on Mac OS and they don't work on Linux. And of course, the reason so many viruses target Windows is because Windows is the dominant desktop operating system, but more and more users out there are running Mac. More and more desktop users are now running Linux. You're starting to see things change a little bit, especially with Mac OS. Here in the last few years, Mac OS has really started to focus on viruses and antivirus programs because more and more the Mac OS is actually a target for some of these viruses that are out there in the wild. Now on Linux, we're still a little more obscure, right? We're still a much smaller percentage of the desktop market share that really viruses are still not targeted at us. And I would say 10 times out of 10, if you ask long-time Linux users, do you need to run an antivirus? The answer is always going to be no. You won't find really anyone in the Linux community running an antivirus. You can go ask in a forum or a subreddit, a Linux Discord channel, the IRC channel, hey, do I need an antivirus on Linux? And overwhelmingly, you're just gonna get flooded with a whole bunch of no's. Now it's possible that as Linux becomes more and more popular on the desktop that we may need to rethink this, the same way that the Mac guys had to rethink their stance on viruses, that it wasn't necessary to have antivirus. In the future, the Linux community, we may need to revisit this at some point, but for right now I would say you definitely don't need antivirus on your Linux system, but there are several things you should be doing on your Linux system to greatly increase the security of that system. By far, the most important thing you can do on your Linux operating system to make it secure is to update the system. Make sure you do regular updates and it doesn't matter if you're running a stable distribution, long-term support release distribution, or if you're running a rolling release distribution, they all have different kind of models of how they push updates out to the users. Some distributions push more updates out to you than others, but regardless of the distribution and regardless of its release schedule, every single Linux distribution pushes out critical updates for security as soon as they're ready. So make sure that you don't go more than a few days or a couple of weeks without actually running an update just in case there's some critical kernel vulnerability out there or some major issue with a web browser or something that could actually cause your system to be insecure. Make sure you're actually updating that machine on a somewhat regular basis. I'm not saying that it's critical that every single day you get up and running an update, but I wouldn't go more than about a week or two without running an update regardless of the distribution I was running. Another really easy way to secure your Linux operating system is make sure you have a firewall enabled and that could be through software such as UFW, the uncomplicated firewall or whatever firewall program you wanna run or you could actually do it with hardware, you could set up a router as a firewall. However it is, you wanna do this, make sure that just any internet traffic that's out there can't actually connect to your computer. That's probably one of the easiest ways to actually secure a machine is just to deny all of those outside connections, most of which are just hackers typically just trying to bang on your machine and see, hey, are you gonna let me in? Speaking of hackers trying to get into your machine, you should actually restrict user access on your machines too for increased security. I've done videos about this in the past, typically especially with things like SSH. If you often SSH into your machines, you remotely connect to your machines, make sure that you have SSH keys set up for that rather than passwords. Also make sure that only certain users can SSH into a machine. Most people will tell you to actually disable root access via SSH, that way no one can ever SSH into a machine as the root user. This means that a hacker now has to guess an actual user other than the root user that exists on your system and that just, again, it's just an extra level of security on a machine and that's really easy to set up. Also for security and for privacy reasons because honestly the most vulnerable a machine is is actually from real life people actually accessing your equipment or sometimes just stealing a piece of equipment such as a laptop. Make sure that you have disk encryption enabled. Most Linux distributions these days allow you to do disk encryption during the installation meaning your files, everything on that hard disk is encrypted, no one can read it unless they have your password or your pass key to unlock the disk encryption. That way if somebody steals that laptop from you they can never access anything on that hard drive without the key. I would also strongly recommend that you should always use a password to actually log into a machine. Many distributions allow you to just automatically log in without being asked for a password again for security and for privacy reasons I strongly recommend never to actually use that feature. Make sure you have to enter a password to get into your machine. Also make sure that password is strong make sure that password is unique. So if you're doing all of those things that I just mentioned honestly your Linux machine should be rock solid secure. There's no reason to be running an antivirus program on that Linux box but could you run antivirus on a Linux machine if you wanted to? Sure, there's antivirus programs out there that run on Linux. There's, I know there's at least three or four off the top of my head that do have Linux versions available. There is one free and open source antivirus program available on Linux. It's called Clam AV. I did a video about Clam AV. I wanna say about four or five years ago now. It's an older video but check it out. It's still relevant. Clam AV free and open source software it's available in every Linux distributions repositories. One thing to know about Clam AV if you choose to run it. It's not like your standard like Windows antivirus programs that are always running in the background constantly scanning for new viruses that crop up on your machine. Clam AV doesn't work that way. You scan your system when you feel like scanning it if you want a regular schedule, you can set up a schedule. So Clam AV runs every week or a month or whatever it is that you set it to know that the scan scanning an entire file system takes a while. So it's not something you really want happening all the time on a machine. The other thing is when you run a program like Clam AV, it will come up with positives but they're typically false positives. They are harmless files on your system that are not actually viruses. So you have to be careful. You don't want to just blindly delete the things that it detects on a file system. And if you're having Clam AV actually scan email directories so if you're having it scan all of your Thunderbird emails for example, and you're one of those people that have thousands or tens of thousands of emails just hanging out in your inbox. Just know that a lot of that stuff has a ton of viruses in it and you're going to get all kinds of positives on your email, but just know all of those positives they're all Windows viruses, right? That's what's going out in email as spam and as these attachments that are dangerous. These are viruses designed to attack Windows machines which is great that you've detected them and you may actually prefer that you have that running because especially if your Linux machine actually connects to other Windows machines for example, in an office setting that may be a reason why you choose to run Clam AV on your Linux box. Not to protect your Linux machine but to protect those Windows machines that sometimes you interact with. But as of right now, do you need to run antivirus on a Linux machine? Should you be running antivirus on a Linux machine? I would say as of today, no, it's absolutely not necessary and to be honest, it's probably more hassle than it's worth. Peace guys.