ClamXav just went commercial, no open source version | Hacker News Reader

ClamXav just went commercial, no open source version

clamxav.com

36 pointsnieve24 comments

How ready are they to go commercial? The update process has been extremely flaky at best, over the past several years. On many machines, I've had to uninstall and reinstall the software for it to make any sort of connection to its updates servers.

It's not clear what their value proposition is when compared to the other well established commercial & free AV vendors. Some like sophos are quite light and unobtrusive.

Oh lord, I misinterpreted this as ClamAV going commercial. :phew:

I had my freakout about ClamAV back when I found out it is owned by Cisco:

http://blog.clamav.net/2013/10/cisco-community-and-open-sour...

I'm curious why anyone would run ClamAV on their Mac. Is this just for IT compliance?

Basically, so the Mac doesn't become a "carrier". Generally, the mail and file servers should detect the virus, but Macs also have AirDrop and there are the various cloud file transfers that have varying levels of virus scans.

We do have the problem of Mac malware, but I don't think ClamAV does anything for that.

It successfully detected the adware now bundled with MPlayerX. My partner and I would probably both have spotted it, but if it was a silent installer instead of a deceptive click-through there would have been zero sign until the adware was already on the system. These days a lot of threats seem to be formerly semi-reputable entities deciding to sell out and voluntarily include malware/adware. I'm sure more than a few people have been saved from Sourceforge's choice to do it to other people's software as well. Viruses and worms aren't that common on Macs, but deceptive malware & trojans are all over the place.

That's good to know. I don't have many folks downloading stuff on the Mac side, but as you note, its a pretty common problem.

There are a couple of in-the-wild nuisances for current versions of Mac OS X. We've encountered Mac Defender, Genieo, Trovi, and others on client systems.

Due to the architecture of Mac OS X, manually finding and removing these things once they're installed can be difficult at best. There are plist files hidden all over the place that can be used to launch and relaunch processes and lots of other nooks and crannies for malware to hide.

See for instance https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203987 and http://www.thesafemac.com/arg-identification/

Macs gets malware too.

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been an example of Mac malware in the wild.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202225

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/none/295168-the-ten-most-dang...

Surely, you can't be serious. Or you are referring to the post OS X Mac and not System 6/7/8, where viruses were pretty common (having worked tech support back then...).

He obviously refers to post OS X.

All the media scares never got anywhere near the majority of Macs, were there are Windows XP viruses that half of the Windows users got...

He should have said that then. Obviously, viruses and malware were a big thing on pre-OS X Macs and even Apple IIs; that is basically where they got their start!

On the other hand, I have seen chrome malware on a mac. But as usual, you have to willingly install it.

Why the downvotes? He's right.

The example links are trojans you have to click to install or proofs of concept, but neither of them ever got to any significant number of users.

And it's not just about "Mac's smaller install base" either. Amiga and Atari had and even smaller install base (and no commercial interest at all for the malware) but there were tons of viruses for them. There were also several for Mac OS (pre X).

> There were also several for Mac OS (pre X)

That's not none in the wild ever. HN can sometimes be a bit literal. (I didn't downvote parent and I've applied an upvote to correct it).

But also click-to-run trojans are malware. They might not be self replicating; some aspects of OSX might limit the harm; but they are malware and they do exist.

>But also click-to-run trojans are malware.

Yeah, they are. But nothing one can do about them besides sandboxing apps (which OS X already does for MAS apps).

At some point, when you click on an app you allow it to execute what code it has.

So the real worthy of the name malware to me is that that spreads by itself without user intervention. E.g. as a virus, or by visiting a page which uses some exploit, etc.

is it substantially more than a graphical frontend to clamav?

and since clamav is GPL, does that mean subscribers get rights to the source?

Doesn't seem like it, it's a GUI app that runs CLI commands and flags for ClamAV, which is separately installed, according to Mark Allan, the developer of ClamXav:

https://www.clamxav.com/BB/viewtopic.php?p=2386#p2386

ClamXav was never open-source, it was previously freeware/donationware.

It is listed as the only packaged solution for ClamAV, otherwise you'll need to build from source.

See: http://www.clamav.net/download.html

Edit: There is a Homebrew package: http://brewformulas.org/Clamav

The purchase page says that it for non-commercial use; no link to a commercial version. Looks like it is still free in the App Store FWIW.

At the bottom of the Store page is a link to the Commercial Store for commercial licenses. No initial launch discounts there. There's also an Education Store.

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