Best value anti-virus programs

[Matt Kettler]

At 02:22 PM 2/17/2005, Paul Welsh wrote:
>I have a single RH9 mail/web server running a licensed copy of F-Prot
>Antivirus for Linux Mail Servers.  I decided on F-Prot because I needed only
>1 licence per server.  If I renew, I'll purchase F-Prot Antivirus for
>Linux/BSD/Solaris File Server because their Mail Server product is now
>licensed on a per user basis.  It costs $399.
>
>MailScanner supports a host of anti-virus products and I am making my way
>down the list, but to save time can anyone point me in the direction of a
>better value alternative, if one exists?

clamav.. in terms of value, it's OSS so it can't be beat.

If nothing else, I'd strongly consider running it as a "second scanner" in
conjunction with a commercial scanner to cover your bases... However, I
find that clam outperforms our commercial product.

Out of 2,437 virus messages since November, there were 0 that our
commercial scanner picked up that calm did not also pick up. However, there
were 918 that clam caught but the commercial product missed. Of the 918,
most were caught by clam's phish-email detection, but 78 were non-phish
hits. Of the 78, most were Worm.Bagle.Gen-zippwd (38), but some are Mydoom
variants (10), Worm.Sober.I (8),  Exploit.HTML.ObjectData (8) and
Trojan.Downloader.Small-165 (5).

Admittedly much of the difference is based on the fact that I update the
commercial signatures less often than clam (8 times daily instead of
hourly), but clearly that shows clamav is a very worthwhile scanner. If
nothing else, the lightweight DNS based approach to freshclam's updates
makes it easy to check for update frequently without a lot of overhead,
unlike some other tools which rely on FTP or http downloads.

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