The latest update for ClamAV is quite impressive

Nov 21, 2014 14:23 GMT  ·  By

ClamAV, an open source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and all kinds of threats, has been updated to version 0.98.5 and is now available for download.

An antivirus solution for the Linux platform might seem odd at first. Technically, there are just a few active viruses right now that could affect the Linux platform, and it's not that easy to create problems to open source distros.

Even if people don't use or possess ClamAV, developers usually patch the operating system or the apps to prevent viruses from working in the first place. The developers’ involvements at such a basic level is one of the reasons why Linux is considered to be safe.

There are a number of instances when it's useful to have an antivirus solution. For example, you might need to scan a driver that has Windows and that's connected to the same PC. Some viruses prevent users from logging in or from scanning with the default antivirus on Windows, but the Linux distros don't have these issues. It's much easier to fix something like a virus or malware from the exterior.

Latest ClamAV update is impressive

The ClamAV updates are not usually full of important changes. They all bring improvements, but everything is done in smaller steps. The devs had a lot of things to add and it shows in the changelog.

Also, it's important to mention that ClamAV is a command line application, which means that it has no interface. The screenshots you can see below are from ClamTK, which is a very friendly frontend for ClamAV.

"ClamAV 0.98.5 includes important new features for collecting and analyzing file properties. Software developers and analysts may collect file property meta data using the ClamAV API for subsequent analysis by ClamAV bytecode programs. Using these features will require that libjson-c is installed, but otherwise libjson-c is not needed."

"Support for the XDP file format and extracting, decoding, and scanning PDF files within XDP files. Addition of shared library support for LLVM versions 3.1 - 3.5 for the purpose of just-in-time(JIT) compilation of ClamAV bytecode signatures. Andreas Cadhalpun submitted the patch implementing this support," say the devs.

Also, the detection of malicious PE files has been improved, the FIPS compliant mode now allows OpenSSL connections, and a number of other features have received various fixes.

More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download ClamAV 0.98.5 right now from Softpedia.

ClamTK (7 Images)

ClamTK in action
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