ClamAv: is anyone paying attention?

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 20:45 +0000, Andy wrote:
> Its a security application, shouldn't it be a little more up to date?
> This is one of the few thinks open source doesn't have, good anti-virus.
> There have been Linux viruses, and if desktop growth increases there
> will be more, we really should get into good practices before problems
> strike.

Just to make one thing clear: ClamAv is there to enable a linux mail
server to protect Windows users from Windows viruses.

AFAIK all GNU/Linux viruses were proof-of-concept and none is in the
wild. Yes, theoretically GNU/Linux is vulnerable and diligence should be
used. But GNU/Linux viruses are not the reason for ClamAvs existence or
use.

> Though in the defence of whoever the maintainer is, he is only 2 minor
> releases behind. (and 3 months)

Actually 1 month, 0.88.5 was released Oct 15 according to the ClamAv
website. And the release notes for 0.88.5 and 0.88.6 on the ClamAv
website contain only minor bugfixes.

Anyway, the more important thing with a virus scanner is that the virus
database is up to date, and this seems to be done via internet anyway:

aptitude show clamav-freshclam
Version: 0.88.4-1ubuntu2
Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers <ubuntu-motu at lists.ubuntu.com>
Description: downloads clamav virus databases from the Internet
 Clam AntiVirus is an anti-virus toolkit for Unix. (...) 
 This package contains the program freshclam and scripts to automate
virus database updating.  Depends on an internet
 connection to function, but can be run in a variety of ways to
compensate for intermittent connections.

> Is any virus scanner in main by the way?

Doesn't look like it