Antivirus and MITS

In most situations, MITS advises against using antivirus or malware protection programs on the server hosting the MITS software.  We frequently see antivirus and malware protection programs cause performance problems and other issues.

Antivirus (AV) programs often see the large number or reads and writes that MITS does as possible malicious behavior. It will slow down each read and write to inspect the action and ensure it's not doing something bad. This can result in the sort of behavior we are seeing.

While you can exclude the MITS directory from the active scans, most AV programs don't do a good job of letting you exclude processes from their passive scans. Also, AV programs are usually self-updating.  We've seen instances where previous exclusions were removed by updates.

This is why we suggest AV should be disabled or removed from the MITS server and not just set to exclude the MITS, PostgreSQL, and UV directories and processes.

We think it's safe to disable AV on the MITS server for a these reasons:

1. Users are not logging into the MITS server directly and visiting websites or checking email, the most common vectors for viruses and malware to enter a system.

2. Anyone who is logging into the MITS server directly should be of an Admin level and know to use standard methods to move things on and off the servers without doing any web surfing.

3. Anti-Virus is intended to protect against attacks on file shares. MITS doesn't use file shares.

4. Virus protection is usually not effective against a database attacks, so it does nothing to protect the data in MITS.