ClamWin: Does open source anti-virus work?

You do realize those articles were written in 2004 and 2007 respectively. Which makes them pretty meaningless.

The press might be right but look at who subsidises and advertises in their publications. In the specific case of Clam AntiVirus however these comments are unfounded; the software is owned by Sourcefire --- a major computer security and intrusion prevention company. Plus Clam AV is used by a significant number of significant users, e.g. SourceForge.

Asking if open source AV works or not is a stupid question IMHO, because open source is just another kind of license. Sure, you can assume that proprietary and commercial AV software works, because money is being made. But what about freeware AV? Such as AVG for example. AVG works partially because they make money on the security suite and nag free users to pay for the better version. Same thing as ZoneAlarm and other freeware security applications.

The only problem I have with open source AV isn't even a problem, but I suspect more of a misunderstanding. I've always thought that if you make a security program and publish its source, people wanting to defeat that level of security can potentially do so by looking at the source and looking for holes.

ClamWin Portable has a few glaring flaws inherent to a portable AV app (e.g. no realtime virus scanner, no automatic or even manual updates) but as far as scanning for viruses, no, I don't see a problem.

Also TC AFAIK Symantec == Norton. Symantec and McAfee is perhaps the better way to say that. But for the record, dedicated team or not, both of those suites are overbloated resource hogs. AVG Free works great for me, despite not having built-in anti-spyware (someone made a big deal out of this in another topic).

Yes, it works

The question is not if it is open source or not. It is how often and well it updates, And how it is intended to function.

I can only speak from my experience of CW but for me it does what it needs to.
I have a name brand commercial real time AV checker, McAfee VirusScan, and am quite happy with it. I use CW and AvastPortable [U3 version] as secondary checkers, a second opinion if you will. They have different databases and methods of checking and that is what I want.

CW often updates several times a day and so in some ways can be cutting edge, you do have to be careful of False Positives, but that is the case of any AV product. If a fresh update of CW detects something that it did not before and my other checkers don't see it at all, I proceed with caution, that is just common sense.

The main rule for me when using a product like CW is "First, do no harm"
In it's default configuration CW just gives you information, and lets you choose what to do, and that is what OSS is all about really, Giving you choices

Just my 2 cents,
Oh, and what John said, the first article was very old.
and the other article was not only old but the guy seemed to have an ax to grind [his second paragraph was just, well ... stupid ]

Tim

Yes it works but dont think that it can detect better than paid AV. Paid AV do reasearch and stuff. I dont know with Clamwin or ClamAV. They are Open-source and free so they don't get much credit except maybe from small donations.

As the headline says .. the press has it all backwards .
The reason no-one cares about so-called real-time AV-scanning
in the open-source community is that it's only "needed" for certain
insecurely designed closed-source operating-systems .
I still laugh every time I think about how comodo decided winlogon.exe was a dangerous virus and deleted it ..

nod32 virus actually sohbet occurred in the program is very good, but sometimes to a computer glitch and is very damaging

[link to spam/malware site broken by mod Tim]

I've worked for a few different companies that use F-Secure and I have nothing but bad things to say about it. It crashes a lot, it crashes other programs a lot, in short an utter piece of junk IMHO. I don't rely on it at all to keep my safe and routinely run my own applications to check my PC for viruses and other harmful software.

I do use the free version of the otherwise commercial AVG at home, and with the exception of the disaster that was version 8, I've never had any problems with it. I've generally recommended it to all my friends and family.

I do keep a copy of ClamWin portable on my drive, just in case. As somebody else said, it doesn't hurt to get a second opinion once in a while. I haven't really used ClamWin enough to know of it's effectiveness but it certainly has never missed anything that other anti-virus programs have found. I've never had any reason to doubt its capability or reliability.

I was always curious that since it's open source, wouldn't it be easier for virus writers to write viruses that bypass or eluded ClamWin, since they could check under the hood as it were and find its Achilles Heel? Of course, why bother in the first place since it's probably a very small total population of all anti-virus program users, but still.