Malware Scanner Tools for Linux

We all know that Linux is the most powerful operating system around us, but there is a misconception that Linux does not need any antivirus programs on it. For maximum protection this is essential. More than 60% of web-servers are running on Linux servers and most of them are protected with some solutions. From my personal experience, I built a server with a properly configured firewall and do regular security updates for better security. But still somehow the sites on the server gets infected and with help of the scan tools I am able to identify the Virus, Malware’s, Rootkits, and Malicious behaviors on server and thus I am able to remove and secured my server.

Here I am introducing some tools to scan your Linux server to get ride off from infection and malware. You can also use these tools scan regularly so that there will be no chance of the sites or system getting hacked and you can configure with your email address for getting alerted if the scan tools find any malicious content on server.

Maldet

Linux Malware Detect (LMD) is a malware scanner for Linux released under the GNU GPLv2 license, that is designed around the threats faced in shared hosted environments. Maldet is one of the widely used scanner nowadays. It uses threat data from network edge intrusion detection systems to extract malware that is actively being used in attacks and generates signatures for detection. The installation and usages of Maldet is quite simple compared to other scanners. Also Maldet offers auto quarantine option, which will instantly removed infected files from the server.

ClamAV

Clam AntiVirus is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version .ClamAV has settings which lets you customize how it runs. For instance when you choose a folder to scan you might just want to scan that one folder and not the sub folders or you might want to scan very large files which obviously take longer to process.It supports multiple file formats (documents, executables or archives), utilizes multi-thread scanner features and receives updates for its signature database at least 3-4 times a day.

Rkhunter

Rkhunter (Rootkit Hunter) is an open source Unix/Linux based scanner tool for Linux systems released under GPL that scans backdoors, rootkits and local exploits on your systems. A rootkit is a malicious mystery program, continuous access to computer access from the usual methods of detecting certain processes or programs.

It scans hidden files, wrong permissions set on binaries, suspicious strings in kernel etc. To know more about Rkhunter and its features visit http://www.rootkit.nl/.

Read more – http://rkhunter.sourceforge.net/

Lynis

Lynis is a battle-tested security tool for systems running Linux, macOS, or Unix-based operating system. It performs an extensive health scan of your systems to support system hardening and compliance testing. The project is open source software with the GPL license and available since 2007. Lynis is one of the most trusted automated auditing tool for software patch management.

Chkrootkit

Chkrootkit is a common Unix-based program intended to help system administrators check their system for known rootkits. A rootkit is a malicious software to get administrator-level access to a computer or network. Rootkit allows hackers to take control of a system without knowing the user. This means that rootkit files are capable of running and configuring system configurations in target machine, and can only be done as a super user of the Linux machine.

Read more – http://www.chkrootkit.org/

Final words

Malware experts offers advanced Malware Scanner with ClamAV engine with auto removal of infected files, thus you don’t need to review all files and remove manually. You can get more information from below link.

Malware Scanner and Removal tool

Hope this article will help you to choose suitable malware scanner for your Linux server. The Truth is that without this tools your server is an open backdoor.