ClamAV
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ClamAV is an open source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and other malicious threats.
clamscan --log-hash --log-file-type --hash-alg=sha2-256 -r /path/to/samples/
FIPSCryptoHashLimits yes
EnableShutdownCommand no
EnableReloadCommand no
clamscan --scan-image=yes --scan-image-fuzzy-hash=no -r /path/to/scan
ScanImage yes
ScanImageFuzzyHash no
export FRESHCLAM_CLIENT_CERT=/path/to/cert.pem
export FRESHCLAM_CLIENT_KEY=/path/to/key.pem
sudo systemctl start clamav-freshclam-once.service
sudo systemctl enable --now clamav-freshclam-once.timer
clamd --fail-if-cvd-older-than=7
time_t age = cl_cvdgetage("/var/lib/clamav");
Summary
ClamAV is an open-source antivirus engine, free to use, that scans files for trojans, viruses, and other malware using signature-based detection. It runs as a command-line tool (clamscan) and as a background daemon (clamd) that can be queried over a socket, with packages, Docker images, and installers available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It's aimed at system administrators and developers who need to build malware scanning into servers, mail gateways, or file-upload pipelines rather than protect a single desktop interactively. It sits in the same endpoint-security space as commercial antivirus engines but distinguishes itself by being open source and embeddable, with a signature-writing format anyone can learn and libclamav APIs for integrating scanning into other software. First committed in 2003, it remains active with 195 contributors, 162 commits in the past year, and a release 51 days ago.
ClamAV is an open source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and other malicious threats.
How ClamAV helps
Which files in this directory or upload contain known malware?
scans every file against its signature database and reports the infected ones by name and the exact signature that matched, walking into supported archive formats to check what's inside them
Can a file be trusted before it moves further into a pipeline?
clamd scans it over a socket and returns a clean or infected verdict quickly enough to gate an upload or mail-transfer step without the caller having to shell out to a new process each time
Which specific threat did this file trip, and can I reproduce that later?
reports the matched signature name and, when configured to log it, the file's hash and detected type — enough to hand to a SIEM or build an allowlist of files already known to be clean
Is a document hiding something a plain file listing wouldn't show?
parses inside container formats like Office documents, archives, PDFs, and images, flagging things such as encrypted OLE2 documents that scanners relying on file extensions alone would pass through
Did the file actually get read all the way through, or did something stop the scan short?
the scan summary reports bytes-scanned versus bytes-read, so a mismatch shows a file was truncated, skipped, or only partially inspected
Does this scanning setup meet a FIPS-restricted environment's crypto rules?
running with FIPS-limits mode disables MD5/SHA1 for signature and trust verification and switches the clean-file cache to SHA2-256, so a scan run under that mode is answering whether the deployment itself is FIPS-compliant, not just the files
Languages
Command line
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Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for ClamAV, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
Score cards are part of every paid plan.
See plans → Already subscribed? Sign in →Trajectory
Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail ClamAV puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Website history
clamav.net, every changeCisco Talos's home page and 2 more pages as they looked each month from August 2021 to October 2026: 27 renders, 0 changes of tagline or palette. Step through them, play them, or put any two months side by side.
Website history is included with Researcher and Business.
See plans → Already subscribed? Sign in →← → or h l a month · Shift a year · [ ] previous / next change · Space play · 1 2 3 page · T whole page · C compare · F full size
← → or h l the right month · Shift the left · S swap · W wipe · T whole page · Esc back
Rebranding timeline
Dates bound when a change appeared between captures. Possible rebrands are AI suggestions; a redesign alone does not establish a rebrand.
Releases
9 entries
No entries match these filters.
- October 20251
- August 20241
- April 20243
- February 20241
- August 20231
- May 20231
- November 20221
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in Cisco-Talos/clamav, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 15 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 2 +2 joined · −2 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 4.1 days first maintainer reply 3.2 days
- Open backlog 329 of 900 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 3 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 329
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 7,252
- bugs 2%
- features 1%
- other 97%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
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