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I recently switched to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as my daily driver OS. Coming from Windows, the first thing I did was install an AV: clamav, along with clamav-daemon and clamTK

However, looking at background system processes, clamAV doesn't seem to be running? How does it intend to act as an anti-virus and protect the PC from threats if it runs only on demand?

Sorry if this is a stupid question, I've been a Windows user all my life and I am used to AV programs running in the background continuously, monitoring all activity and immediately sounding alerts if they find something suspicious.

Is that not how security works in Linux? What am I missing? I use this system for internet banking, I cannot afford to have it compromised..

promotheus
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ClamAV is designed to be an on-demand scanner, and will only run when you invoke it to run (which mean you probably won't see any of its processes if you did not manually invoke it). Also, when you installed the clamav package, you only installed the command-line scanner and scanning engine.

clamav-daemon - enables ClamAV to be an on-access scanner, which means it runs automatically without your intervention

You can see the full answer here

Community
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Marcio Mazzucato
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