The free antivirus ClamAV has just reached the new version 1.0, some 20 years after its first release.
ClamAV describes itself as a free, open source, antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware and other malicious threats. Detection levels are quite low compared to Windows anti-malware programs, but development has been going on for decades. The tool is available on all platforms, although it mainly targets Linux.
ClamAV was recently released its latest version, which can be considered historically significant, as it finally reaches version 1.0.0. It's the first major release and it came just six months after celebrating his 20th birthday!
Tomasz Kojm, the original creator of ClamAV, released the first version (0.10) on May 8, 2002. ClamAV 1.0.0 follows the previous version 0.105.1, bringing new features, compilation warning fixes, and many bug fixes.
ClamAV is an open-source antivirus engine primarily used in Linux environments. The program runs almost everywhere, from open source operating systems (FreeBSD) to macOS server. Starting with version 0.97.5, ClamAV can also run on Windows, even though it is not the most popular AV tool for any Microsoft operating system.
It is quite different compared to a typical anti-malware program for Windows users. The tool is run from the command line and is simply an on-demand scanner with no real-time monitoring.
However, ClamAV includes many advanced and complex antivirus features, such as scanning multiple types of compressed files (Zip, Rar, Dmg, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2 and others), parallel multi-threaded scans, built-in support for all standard file formats mail, Elf (Linux) executables and popular document formats, monitoring specific folders/directories for changes and more.
Being an open source project managed by volunteers, with minimal paid developers, ClamAV is difficult to compare with commercial antivirus packages.
In an old comparative test which conducted by AV-TEST (2015), ClamAV scored poorly in on-demand detection, avoiding false positives, but also detecting the rootkit.
