What % of viruses go unfound?

[Schultz]

I had extended the discussion to general security, one of the posters being convinced that Ubuntu was a reference in terms of security (and so, since Ubuntu says antivirus programs are useless, it is like Gospel).

Ubuntu, and 99% of everybody else in the know, including the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article you linked to. (And yes, my 99% figure is unscientific, but probably close to accurate.)

[MikeNovember]

I had extended the discussion to general security, one of the posters being convinced that Ubuntu was a reference in terms of security (and so, since Ubuntu says antivirus programs are useless, it is like Gospel).

Ubuntu, and 99% of everybody else, including the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article you linked to.

Hi,

There are different flavors of linuxes, Ubuntu is not a reference in terms of security, and the 1st paragraph of Wikipedia says:

Linux, Unix and other Unix-like computer operating systems are generally regarded as very well-protected against, but not immune to, computer viruses.

What don't you understand in "generally regarded as very well-protected against, but not immune to, computer viruses"? Are you dissatisfied with "not immune"?

Not immune means some viruses, in some circumstances, can affect Linuxes.

To avoid to be affected, there is prevention, detection, and emergency measures in case of infection:

- Prevention / Risk decrease: updated system, security features enabled (SELINUX, apparmor), use of sandboxing (flatpaks, snaps, firejail), safe-browsing (hosts file used as IP addresses filter, extensions such as uBlock Origin, browser protection against malware sites, and user behavior).

- Detection: this cans be done only by online or offline virus scanners. And, to go back to the title of this post "What % of viruses go unfound?", the answer is 100% without any detection mean, and a detection rate related to the virus scanner you use and the freshness of its signatures. Virus Total, using tens of scan engines and their signatures, probably offers the higher detection rate.

- Emergency measures when infection occurs: external (not infected) backups of system and user files available to restore computer to a secure state.

Prevention, detection, emergency measures are the three steps involved in any security approach.

A lack of one of the three steps generally puts you in trouble; here:
- without prevention, you strongly increase the risk of your computer being infected;
- without detection, you have the risk to consider your computer secure, then backup infected files over good ones;
- without a backup, you risk to be unable to recover your user files (and here is the value, not in system files).

Regards,

MN

[Schultz]

I never said Linux was immune to viruses.

[markz]

I installed it
sudo apt install clamav
Just want to see before freshly installing either Linux Mint again or trying a new distro.

How do I open ClamAV?
I tried in the LM search at the bottom left and it did not find it.

Thank you very much for all your guys' help
viewtopic.php?t=123127
sudo apt-get install clamav clamav-daemon clamav-freshclam

sudo apt-get install clamtk

ClamTK is what comes up

[RollyShed]

What % of viruses go unfound?

No matter what discussion there is about this, the answer has to be 100%.

If the question was "What percentage of known viruses go unfound?", that would be different.

If there are any, and no one has specified any that have been found, the answer can only be 100% - logically.