this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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I have always heard not to use antivirus on Linux but I saw the post about a guy getting a RAT exploit backdoored through wine and it had me thinking should I be using ClamAV or some other antivirus for Linux?

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[–] user28282912@piefed.social 20 points 1 day ago

Ignore the idiot posting about this RAT.

If you want to secure your Linux system, use ClamAV, a local firewall like UFW or even opensnitch for a start. Also use your head when adding apps to your system. Stick to the official repos from your distro. Things like Arch's AUR, random PPAs in Ubuntu and any random github project are going to be much riskier by their very nature so act accordingly.

If you need to risky stuff, do it a VM and network that guest into a private internal network that can only exit over a companion PFSense VM that is dual homed to the regular LAN and the private internal network. Take a snapshot of the risky guest before you use it in a session and when you are done, roll back to your clean snapshot.

Store your passwords in something like Keepass(strong master password!) and then use syncthing to push copies of the database to at least one other box locally or in the cloud if you really have to.