The Sysadmin’s Daily Grind: HTTP Antivirus Proxy

IN THE LINE OF FIRE

Article from Issue 70/2006
Author(s):

Browsers live in continual danger of compromise by a malicious site. An intermediate proxy combined with a virus scanner can help.

Just recently, a colleague who was planning a trip tried to surf to a website run by a major city in Germany. Now this may just be a coincidence, or it may be a character defect, who knows, but this fellow ended up mistyping the URL. The page this took him to immediately tried to attack a vulnerability in his browser. One possible approach – besides regular updates, but I’m sure you’ve all heard that before! – is an anti-virus proxy such as HAVP [1]. An Antivirus Proxy The HTTP Antivirus Proxy install is a simple configure && make && make install. You need to specify your preferred virus scanner – which has to be pre-installed – at the configure step.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Charly's Column

    Checking email for viruses is typically the domain of the SMTP gateway or a server directly downstream of it. In this month’s column, Charly decides to move this protection to the other side – that is, to the client connections
    with their SMTP and POP servers.

  • Charly's Column

    Too many cooks spoil the broth, they say, but it could just as easily be an ingredient that isn’t part of the recipe. If you can’t reduce the number of cooks, you have to take other steps to make your broth more edible.

  • Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico

    This Linux computer on a USB stick acts as a tiny mobile firewall.

  • Security Lessons: ClamAV

    Protecting Windows clients from the big bad Internet.

  • Filter Proxy for AD

    You might want to reap the benefits of active directory’s single sign-on for your virus scanning and content filtering. If you also use Squid to handle user access to the internet, you have a front-row seat for “when worlds collide.”

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News