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.

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