With all the excitement about the new viruses and worms or Trojans, or whatever you want to call them since the experts can’t seem to all agree on this one, I thought I’d take a look at an anti-virus. Since Norton has already shown us how dependable their solution is, and since Sophos just recently trashed perfectly good files, by the hundreds in an attempt to protect users from a worm that is not even ‘in the wild’ and which is nearly impossible to get unless you actively seek it out, I figured I’d take a look at some less ‘professional’ and expensive alternatives.

One program that kept getting mentioned on various community sites as being a good anti-virus alternative to the corporate ‘solutions’ was clamXav.

Impartiality
It is a sad day when one has to take such things into account, but, with all the FUD that has been going around lately, the community at large is beginning to question the security experts and solution providers. This program is a free, GPL solution, and is offered as a service to the community. As such many feel it is more trustworthy than the alternatives out there.

It uses no helper applications, which have been criticized by the community, and is about as transparent as a program can get.

What it does…
Much like you would expect from an anti-virus program, it scans your files for possible viruses and then attempts to deal with them.

The program uses an interface that is almost simplistic, all the controls being located in one central window. The preferences contain some controls and options but for the most part, everything you need is located in the main window.

Scanning your files
clamXav can be pointed in the direction of one of your drives or folders in order to scan the contents for any possible virus. It will also search your e-mail boxes for any attachments that contain worms, viruses and the likes.

Scanning is as easy as selecting the drive, or folder, which you want scanned and hitting the start button. At this point it will begin going through the files one by one until it has scanned them all. Throughout the process, it will display the file it is currently at, and any infected files found. The larger the files, the longer the time it takes to scan them, and in all truthfulness, the program is not the fastest in the world, scanning 5GB of data in a little over 30 minutes.

One of the biggest limitations of the program is how it handles the scanning of mail inboxes. It will report that a mailbox is infected, but it doesn’t tell you which exact mail in that inbox is infected, leaving you to go through a trial and error procedure to identify the culprit.

Another issue is that of automation, it doesn’t like scheduling tasks, and even if you were to attempt a ‘manual automation’ by having it start scanning everything before you went away from the computer, it still wouldn’t work. This is because it can only scan one volume at any given time, meaning that, unless you have only one volume, you would have to start the process several times.

Infected files
In this respect, clamXav is unlike other similar programs. It cannot clean or disinfect the files, but it will however quarantine them. From the preferences you can set a quarantine folder, where infected files will be moved. This approach does have its merits. For one thing you cannot loose any data unless you delete it yourself. However, it also means that those files are largely unusable because they will remain infected and you would have to use some other tool to clean them.

Another important issue is that of the mail handling. If it finds a virus in one of your mail inboxes, it will not remove just the offending mail, but will place the entire inbox file in quarantine, meaning that the quarantine option and the scanning of mail inboxes are somewhat incompatible. Still, the program will warn you when it finds an infected file that also happens to be a mail inbox that possible mail loss may occur if it is quarantined and also mentions this in the preferences.

Compared to other anti-virus programs out there, this one might seem like a joke, especially to PC users who have their similar products running at all times, scanning everything. ClamXav has no such abilities and only scans when you tell it to by clicking the button, but, in all fairness, despite the bomb threats of last week, the Mac platform is still virus free from the point of view of many Mac users, and virus scanning is still more of a courtesy to Windows users than a need to actually protect ourselves.

The Good
Free, impartial, and easy to use. It will not do anything harmful by itself, it will not delete any files and will not cause more problems than it solves.

The Bad
Lack of scheduling and the ability to scan the entire computer in one go.

The Truth
Perhaps not the best anti-virus software out there, but definitely one of the better ones… despite the lack of bells and whistles. It is constantly being updated and the definitions seem to be kept very up to date, especially considering this is a free program.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: