Effective virus scanners

Antony Stone Antony at SOFT-SOLUTIONS.CO.UK
Sun Aug 24 09:07:53 IST 2003


On Sunday 24 August 2003 3:57 am, Chris Mason wrote:

> I have managed (pretty easy) to install and configure
> MailScanner/SpamAssassin/ClamAV and they work great in the two sites I
> have installed them.
> From your experience how effective is the ClamAV virus database? Is
> there a better free virus scanner?

Depends where you work / who you are / what you use your machine for.

ClamAV is the only Open Source - really free - antivirus scanner that I know
of.

However there are several commercial vendors who have products they licence
at no cost for home use, or for personal workstation use, etc...

The following certainly have trial or evaluation versions available for
download from their websites - have a look at their licences and see if you
think you qualify:

http://www.mcafee.com
http://www.kaspersky.com
http://www.f-prot.com
http://www.pandasoftware.com
http://www.antivir.de
http://www.bitdefender.com

(Note that some of these may involve a bit of searching around for the Unix
command-line version, however I assure you they're there - I've tried them.)

Certainly F-Prot is free for personal workstation use.

I'm very impressed with the ClamAV scanner, especially when combined with a
little intelligent filename blocking (bat|scr|pif|com|exe|cmd) so you block
viruses even before you know what they are.

However, given the ease of plugging more than one A-V engine into
MailScanner, that's what I like to do.

Regards,

Antony.

--

In science, one tries to tell people
in such a way as to be understood by everyone
something that no-one ever knew before.

In poetry, it is the exact opposite.

 - Paul Dirac



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