clamav VS dnscrypt-proxy

My recommendation would be to use ClamAV an open source antivirus engine. It is a versatile tool designed to detect multiple types of threats from numerous file formats and other use cases (cross-platform, integration such as mail server). Finally, it is updated on a daily basis, ensuring protection against the latest known threats. This rapid update cycle is crucial for an antivirus tool to be effective.

Linux has (free) tools to improve security and detect/remove malware: Lynis,Chkrootkit,Rkhunter,ClamAV,Vuls,LMD,radare2,Yara,ntopng,maltrail,Snort,Suricata...

There's clamAV which is open source: https://www.clamav.net/

For personal use, the most commonly used is ClamAV.

Absolutely but if the OP feels they must then they should look into the free ClamAV.

I'd go with what Bman said but second to that ClamAV is a good free option.

Ehhh, there is antivirus software for Linux, like ClamAV. Also a lot of exploits these days target browsers since its an easier attack vector. Also, malware is malware, and most servers use Linux by default. So any malware that's targeting a Linux server could target a desktop user. I don't like the whole "Haha, malware doesn't affect me because everyone targets windows". Sure, those "download now!" buttons that are targeted to gullible windows users might not work on your operating system however your OS is still vulnerable and can still be exploited by malware.

There is more than one way to do this but I have decided to use dnscrypt-proxy. We will not be using dnscrypt for the dnscrypt protocol though you could elect to use that as the underlying DNS protocol. dnscrypt-proxy lets's us use a SOCKS5 proxy through which the DNS queries will be sent. We will use a Tor SOCKS5 proxy here. You can choose which protocols should be enabled and which ones should be disabled. There are two points:

I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Installation-linux

This is awesome, thanks -- going to look into that now. I found SmartDNS interesting and thought I would share it, it's pretty simple to setup. I can see why it's Chinese focused, they have "interesting" internet access over there :-).

I have been looking into DNS quite a bit lately (Unbound, etc), as DNS lookup performance has been pretty subpar lately. I'm in Perth, Australia, and we're pretty remote so our latency is meh at best, and Cloudflare performance has been all over the shop lately, I think they're having issues in WA). DNS can also cause really routing issues here sometimes as we get better latency to Singapore than Sydney, so we might get shunted off to SG.

I've also been using dnscrypt-proxy2 (https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy) for a while, but the above issues with Cloudflares DNS is what triggered me to look into other options.

I use a min-cache-ttl of 15 minutes, which seems to work well.

Thank you for sharing this tip about, looking into this now :).

Sure. I run dnscrypt_proxy behind a pihole. https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy