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Antivirus software, antivirus or antivirus program is a kind of computer software that is used for protection, identification and removal of computer viruses and other programs that may damage the software, known as malware.

Unlike the original antivirus programs that were based solely on the treatment of computer viruses, a modern antivirus program is designed to protect the system from a great number of different possible malicious programs (worms, viruses, Trojan horses, rootkits, spyware , adware), phishing attack etc.

It is known that the first antivirus programs have appeared in 1983.

Antivirus programs have independent and proactive way of functioning. Most antivirus programs with proactive mode can not work simultaneously on a single computer. Some antivirus programs come with built-in firewall, spyware detection tools and related security tools.

Recently, on various forums there have been a lot of discussions whether to install antivirus software on Linux or not. Many people do not understood what exactly do these antivirus programs and whether they have ever needed them.

Well, here is the list of most popular antivirus softwares you can use on your Linux.

Avast! Antivirus

Avast! Antivirus is a freeware antivirus software, produced by Czech company ALWIL Software, operating since 1991. The first version was published in 1988. It is currently available in 27 languages. Its effectiveness has been confirmed by ICSA certified and it was awarded with many prizes like Virus Bulletin 100% Award. The program is available in two versions: Home Edition and Professional.

Simple user interface is available when you run scans on demand. It allows you to easily define the basic parameters and functions to access files in quarantine, preview, and the event log to update virus signatures. Extended interface is available only in Professional version.

The program integrates with the operating system layer, allowing access to critical system functions from the context menu.

The Linux version of the user interface requires GTK + 2.x. If  it’s not present in the system, it will be added during installation.

The last stable version is 4.8.1356, released 2009-09-25.

Main features:

Antivirus kernel:
- Almost 100% detection
- Outstanding performance
- Reasonable memory requirements
- ICSA certified

User Interface:
- Intuitive Simple User Interface
- Independent on installed graphic libraries
- Testing of whole disks or just selected folders
- Defining and running of antivirus tests
- Working with the scan results
- Actions with infected files
- Storing the scan results (history)
- Virus encyclopedia
- Command-line scanner with STDIN/STDOUT mode

Updates:
- Non-incremental updates
- Updates can be completely automatic
- Standard updates are provided 2 times a week

Nowadays almost everyone who had ever used a computer knows what a file archiver is. It represents a program that combines a number of files together into an archive file for easier storage. Although many users consider that file archivers are used to compress the data in order to reduce the size of the archive, their functions are not limited to that. For instance, the most basic archivers just take files and create an archive without compressing them.

There are multiple compression algorithms available to compress data. You should remember that some kinds of data can be highly compressed and some kinds of data do not benefit from compression. At the moment archive formats are also used to package software files for distribution, installation, and execution.

Let’s see what the most popular archive formats are and what they are used for. All of them are divided into 5 different types:

1. Archiving only formats (only combine files):

- ar, cpio, tar and etc.

2. Compression only formats (only compress files):

- gzip, bzip2, LZMA, compress and etc.

3. Multi-function formats can combine, compress, encrypt, create error detection and recovery information, and repackage the archive into self-extracting/self-expanding files:

- 7z, ACE, ARC, cpt, dmg, GCA, kgb, LZX, RAR, qda, ZIP and etc.

4. Software Packaging formats are used to create software packages that may be self-installing files:

- deb, pkg, RPM, MSI, JAR and etc.

5. Disk Image formats are used to create disk images or optical disk images of mass storage volumes:

- OEB Package Format, OEBPS Container Format, Open Packaging Conventions and etc.

If you would like to learn more about archive formats, please visit this page.

Most likely you’ve already understood that in the given post we are not going to review all the archive formats, but the most popular one – RAR.
As it was mentioned before RAR is a multi-function archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, file spanning and etc. Though at the moment it’s licensed by Win.rar GmbH, it was originally developed by Russian software engineer – Eugene Roshal (RAR comes from Roshal ARchive).

You should know that RAR files can be created only using commercial software and the one that has permission from the author. In fact the only freeware that can be used to create RAR files is RAR for Pocket PC.

Read more…

Do you have too many accounts with different passwords or PIN codes to remember? Do you keep passwords written down? Once you might forget these passwords and than you cannot access an important forum, website or even your email account! Don’t worry, the problem is already solved!

The idea of secure passwords has appeared a bunch of years ago when the number of passwords has increased. As it is insecure to use the same password for multiple accounts, you need to either remember all your passwords or write them down anywhere. Luckily, there are some solutions that allow us to maintain security and use secure passwords at the same time. This kind of software is called password managers and we’re going to include a brief review of them.

What is a password manager? A password manager software helps a user to organize his passwords. Password manager uses a local database, where the encrypted data is stored. It may also have additional features such as automatically filling in forms or generating random secure passwords.

Password managers are available for many platforms such as for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, Pocket PC, Smart Device, Palm OS and U3. We have taken most popular 3 password managers for linux and are going to describe them below:

Password Gorilla

The Password Gorilla helps you manage your logins. It stores all your user names and passwords, along with login information and other notes, in a securely encrypted file. A single “master password” is used to protect the file. This way, you only need to remember the single master password, instead of the many logins that you use. The latest version 1.4 was released in July 3, 2006. Password Gorilla is platform-independent software, runs on most operating systems has been tested on Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Features:
- Password Safe 3 file format is supported.
- Search Password option.
- Hide main window when coming up and asking to open a file.
- Improved seed for initializing the pseudo-random number generator.
- Allow closing a locked database using the “X” button.

KeePass Password Safe

KeePass Password Safe is a tool for managing user’s passwords, released under the GNU GPL. The program stores logins, passwords and addresses of the URLs in an encrypted database. Access to the database is obtained by providing your password or a file-key. KeePass uses strong and secure encryption algorithms such as AES and Twofish, and hash SHA-256. KeePass keeps encrypted passwords in his memory even after starting and opening a database. There are Linux, Windows and Pocket PC editions of this software and it is highly recommended if you are planning to use them on multiple devices.

GPass

GPass is a password management software for GNOME desktop. GPass encrypts the file that keeps the password collection by using Blowfish security algorithm, one of the most secure on the market. The latest version of GPass is 0.5.1 and was released in March 25, 2006. Requirements are: GNOME2 libraries, OpenSSL cryptographic library.

There are some password managers that are integrated in browsers. An example could be Lastpass. It can be integrated with Firefox to store all your passwords. The only thing that doesn’t seems to be good is that your passwords are stored at a remote server and the possibility of data leek is much higher. Though I don’t think they have any reason to steal your data, it is much more pleasant to have the password database stored at a hard drive or a removable media, just like flash drive. Modern Password managers can be run from a USB Flash so that’s another good feature: your password database becomes portable and you don’t need to keep in mind all your passwords.

We recommend you to use password managers for everyday needs. Never share your password files to anyone and do not write your passwords to a text file. Let password manager do its job!