Clam av

how is clam av in catching viruses and trojans

 

i was not at all impressed by it. i was ok at the mainstream viruses but lacked a lot in the trojan dept. a lot of large companies use it so it cant be all that bad or they would abandon it in a sec. but my experiences with it were not up to my standards

 

Clam AV is popular with large Companies/ISPs in their mail servers as it's free and Unix-friendly.

Poor detection HERE.

However, ClamWin uses generic definitions so it could provide protection while waiting for an update. Can only be used as a back-up scanner at present as no RTM and the scan speed is IME, very slow.

 

Could not agree more with you Firecat, the scan speed is terribly low and it slows down my PC.
Though, it detected a trojan not detected by Avast Pro & Bitdfender free...

 

ClamWin, which uses the Clam AV engine, is slow at scanning for sure. It has frequent updates, often more than one per day, and is claimed to be one of the quickest in adding newly discovered virus defs. It seems to be focused more toward e-mail virus and less toward trojan detection. I've had many false-positives using ClamWin, and would not delete anything it finds without first confirming the suspect file with an online multi-engine scanner.

 

Clam AV is a Linux application & has a Real-time Monitor, as well as an on-demand scanner.

ClamWin is a Windows-translated application, but has ONLY an on-demand scanner. The reason it runs a bit heavy is that it uses a Linux-to-Windows cross-over program of some sort.

Firefighter has tested ClamWin from time to time. His results are here on Wilders. A search should do the job, but hopefully, he will post to this thread.

 

Old version of ClamWin has poor trojan detection HERE.

 

I'm a fan of Clamav, the linux server based mailscanner. Catches all regular virusses that propagate through the mail. Definition updates are very fast, the open source community is very quick in catching new virusses and analysing them.
If tests indicate that Clam doesn't catch all, so be it. In my situation clam is the first anti virus line of defense and it's performing great.
Our other servers and all workstations are protected by commercial scanners. Since introducing our clam scanner (a Barracuda spamfirewall) some 6 months ago, we haven't seem more than a handfull of mail virusses detected on pc's (virusses hidden within encrypted zips). There is a slight difference between testing using virus definitions and running live production.

The last two months all detections on workstation are trojan downloaders that infiltrate our lovely ( ) Internet Explorer.