ClamWin

I am confused. CalmWin only detects about 31000 viruses.
This is less than any other free av not to mention the commercial ones.
Am I correct?

 

As we said many times (even on avast! forums) Mina. These numbers don't mean anything. ClamAV is just not focused on old (and obsolete) DOS viruses which cannot run under WinNT anyway. And ClamAV also supports some kind of generic detection so it can detect several different malware within same family.
We also don't know if they count 1 signature as 1 malware family (ie whole MyDoom family) or 1 signature as 1 revision of malware (ie MyDoom-A version only).

 

Clamav on linux is very efficient. So far it only refuses to detect plexus-b on my e-mail server. I've reported it a few times, but it seems not to pick 'm up. Avast on my workstation catches it.
So apart from this plexus deficiency, clam catches all viruses thrown at it. This wil do for me.
Our corporate mail is scanned by a Barracuda spam firewall: spamassassin AND Clamav. We've had less than a dozen virusses get past clamav in almost a million messages. Very impressive performance (Barracuda's anti spam filter is very good too).

I don't know about the performance of clamwin, but the signatures are great. And the Clam community seems to be able to create signatures very fast.

 

The size of ClamAVs database may not be anything to write home about, but apparently they do get some things in their database faster than anyone else. I've also seen a couple variants of the backdoor Agent.[xx] that ClamAV and KAV detected when nobody else did. It's not a bad one to have around for on-demand scanning.

If you find something that it doesn't detect, or detects heuristically, make sure to submit it to them.

 

Lately the ClamWin forum has gotten more active. Until recently, questions & comments went without answers for months & months. Now the intelligent/reasonable/non-inflammatory posts are being answered within a few days at most. Also, word has it that they are busily at work on developing a real-time monitor for ClamWin.

ClamWin is SourceForge's *Project of the Month* for February.

This open-source project deserves $upport. I upped my donation. Up yours?

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clamav is also a little better than it fairs. I also run it on my email servers with spamassassin under linux and very few things ever make it to my inbox. out of maybe 1000 emails a day roughly I see maybe one or two spams and no virii. Clamav is very fast with definition updates and they do updates hourly. Allot of times they have new def files before kav.

The only downside is that they dont have as good of unpacking support as kav unless you properly configure it. I have my servers setup fairly well. and so catch a few more things than most.

 

They do not update hourly, but one or two times a day - sometime more, but not 24 times a day.

 

How do you use it? ClamAV works better if it receives the files from some "preprocessor", like amavis or qmail-scanner. Also make sure you use the latest release.

 

well maybe for clamwin but freshclam under linux updates every hour by default.

 

It just checks for updates - this doesn´t mean it finds a new version each time.

 

correct.