Clam AntiVirus is an open source antivirus toolkit for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The main design feature of ClamAV was to integrate it with mail servers to perform attachment scanning and help filter out known viruses. The package provides a flexible and scalable multithreaded daemon (clamd
), a command-line scanner (clamscan
), and a tool for automatic updating via the Internet (freshclam
). The programs are based on a shared library, libclamav
, distributed with the Clam AntiVirus package, which you can also use with your own software.
The version of ClamAV we are going to use in this chapter is the latest stable version, 0.95.2, that has an up-to-date virus database and signatures to enable detection of over 580,000 viruses, worms, and Trojans including Microsoft Office macro viruses, mobile malware, and other threats. Although not covered in this book, it is also able to perform on-access scanning under Linux with suitable installation into the Linux kernel...