ClamAV Installation and Scanning on CentOS

  ClamAV open source antivirus engine

ClamAV is an open source (GPL) antivirus engine designed for detecting Trojans, viruses, malware and other malicious threats. It is the de facto standard for mail gateway scanning. It provides a high performance mutli-threaded scanning daemon, command line utilities for on demand file scanning, and an intelligent tool for automatic signature updates

CentOS 6 – 32-bit

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

 CentOS 6 – 64-bit

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

 CentOS 5 – 32-bit

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

 CentOS 5 – 64-bit

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

After running the above commands for your relevant CentOS version, the following file is created:

/etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

The above file can be edited directly to enable or disable the EPEL repo.

2. Install required ClamAV packages

yum install clamav clamd

3. Start the clamd service and set it to auto-start

/etc/init.d/clamd on
chkconfig clamd on
/etc/init.d/clamd start

4. Update ClamAV’s signatures

/usr/bin/freshclam

Note: ClamAV will update automatically, as part of /etc/cron.daily/freshclam.

B. Configure Daily Scan

In this example, we will configure a cronjob to scan the /home/ directory every day:

1. Create cron file:

vim /etc/cron.daily/manual_clamscan

Add the following to the file above. Be sure to change SCAN_DIR to the directory that you want to scan:

#!/bin/bash
SCAN_DIR="/home"
LOG_FILE="/var/log/clamav/manual_clamscan.log"
/usr/bin/clamscan -i -r $SCAN_DIR >> $LOG_FILE

Give our cron script executable permissions:

chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/manual_clamscan

You can even run the above script to ensure that it works correctly.

And you’re done! That should be the minimum required to

 00 10 * * * * root freshclam 

This command will update ClamAV database at 10 am every day.

Good Luck ....!!!