how to scan viruses in local network?

Question

how to scan viruses in local network?

Answer 1

Many Antiviruses are trying to develop technologies to handle this but Kaspersky Internet is a very good option. You can easily set it to scan through your network from any computer that has the privilege to do that. You can also get the Server version of the same Antivirus and you will be very fine.

Answer 2

There's no easy way to do that. Going to every single computer and starting a manual scan isn't an option because it's time consuming and you can't be sure if every single computer has an antivirus that's updated with the latest virus definitions. Creating shares isn't a viable option either because, depending on the size of your network, it might take several days before the computer finishes scanning all the shares. The solution is to adopt a client/server antivirus solution (Symantec is a good choice). All you have to do is install the server and configure it to get the latest updates automatically. But that's an easy task. After that, from the server console you can push the clients to every computer in the network. In other words, the server acts like a remote install server which installs the antiviruis clients on each computer you specify. So let the server do the work for you. After he infrastructure is ready you can go ahead and create groups, update plans, security warnings and so on. besides the obvios advantages (the server will push updates to the clients so on every computer the virus definitions will be up to date) you also have the posibility of remotely starting scans, you'll get notifications when a virus was found on one of the computers and so on. The client/server infrastructure applies only to well organized networks and it's best to have active directory installed. Of course you must be a domanin admin or have an account that has administratve priviledges on the client computers. Otherwise the deployment will fail. If you are in a network where clients have nothing to do one with eachother, like the network of an isp the there's no way you can do a scan for viruses. The best thing is to protect yourself by taking into account the worst case scenario. Every computer in the network is infected.

Answer 3

Scan Network For Virus

Answer 4

While normally you would need an enterprise level anti-virus to accomplish this task, I found a way to do it using the free ones. The computer I wanted to scan was a server RAID but the free Avast/AVG would not install to Server 2003. Since my network has Active Directory installed and since my client is a domain member, I am able to easily map a network drive to my computer and Avast and AVG both allow the scan of this mapped drive as if it were a local one. I am sure you could do something similar without the domain as long as you can get administrator rights to the mapped drive.



I will test this using Virtual PC and let you know the results.



EDIT: Test successful. I created three virtual computers - two running Windows XP and one running Windows Server 2003. I did not install Active Directory. I installed Avast onto one of the XP computers (called computer one) and no anti-virus on any of the other computers. I then enabled Windows File Sharing on all three computers but did not select any specific folder to share. I then mapped computer one to the administrative share on the second XP computer (c$) and used the administrator account for access and Avast scanned this drive for viruses (found none at all, naturally). I made another mapping to the Server computer's administrative share (computer 3) and used Avast to scan this drive as well. It work all around.



The reason this is allowed by Avast and AVG is because of the increasing number of home file servers. A lot of people buy the brand name NAS devices which are accessed through shared folders and cannot have any antivirus installed. The solution to protect the user from potential viruses on these devices is to allow people to scan mapped network drives.

Answer 5

I am a developer at Microsoft so I know a thing or two about computers. The best PC cleaner and antivirus program is PC Health Boost, it's very light and it's the only antivirus/cleaner with a 99.99% detection rate.



It's also a PC booster so your computer will be running faster than nomal. Download it here for free: http://www.pcboostsoftware.com

Answer 6

You need a program that will do a network scan, such as Trend Micro's Internet Security package.

Answer 7

You would need a server based version of the anti-virus, these are expensive. You would also still need to load it onto each machine.

Answer 8

Sound arguments here.