Re: Oracle and Anti-virus

On Jan 15, 3:40 pm, "astalavista" <nob..._at_nowhere.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> What are your recommendations about
> oracle and anti-virus ?
> ( oracle 9.2 on windows 2000 )
> no-antivirus ?
> enable ?
>
> Thanks for your lights ...

Will the server participate in an Active Directory domain? If so, then malware running (remotely) with credentials of a domain admin could affect the $ shares.
Even without domain membership, there would still be the issue of vulnerabilities that do not require authentication (I believe that there was an RPC issue not long ago that did not require authentication to be exploited).

My point is that even if no one logs onto the server console (remote desktop, vnc included) that the server OS is still vulnerable to worms on the network.

Anti-virus software can cause its own issues also, such as removal of good, healthy files and general performance problems, so its not a complete solution in itself.

What services will the box need to support in addition to the Oracle listener and database instances (such as network backups using domain authentication)?

If you're aiming for defense-in-depth, I don't see how you can avoid using some sort of anti-virus software on an MS Oracle server. When a problem occurs, its not really a defensible position to have not been using something to attempt to safeguard the OS. Whether or not the anti-virus software is in fact effective is another story.

-bdbafh Received on Mon Jan 15 2007 - 16:03:18 CST