[clamav-users] Calm AV assistance

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Fri, 5 Nov 2021, Michael Pifer via clamav-users wrote:

> I am specifically looking for assistance in setting up and configuring Clam
> AV in our AWS EC2 environment.
>
> We are specifically looking to create a scanning service using clam av that
> can be called everywhere a file is uploaded.  Make sure that if a file is
> flagged as having a virus that we delete the file and return a message to
> the user that the file appears to be infected and was not successfully
> uploaded.
>
> Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

ClamAV is really just a toolkit.  You can learn how to use it to scan
data streams, files, directories and whole filesystems against a set
of signatures and other stuff which is stored - more or less locally -
by you in a sort of database.  You decide what to put in the database
(and then you have to maintain it, there are tools in the ClamAV suite
to help you to do that).  Other tools in the suite can help you to do
something like what you want to do, but if we are to provide any help
other than generalities and pointers to the documentation you need to
give us sufficient detail about what you intend to do.  The online
documentation is at

https://docs.clamav.net/

and if you download ClamAV from one of the archives at

https://www.clamav.net/downloads

you will also find documentation in the archive.

Things like returning messages to users are the sorts of things that
you have to do in your own software, which can use the ClamAV toolkit
and perhaps collect information from ClamAV scan results which can be
returned to your users.  These things are not part of ClamAV itself.
The messages provided by ClamAV are at best rather terse, you would
probably want to embellish them in your own software for consumption
by your users.

If ClamAV *does* flag a file, deleting it will not always be the best
choice of the options available to you.

If ClamAV does *not* flag a file, accepting that it is safe will not
always be the best choice of the options available to you.  You should
consider carefully the probabilities that ClamAV will detect the kinds
of threats which concern you.

-- 

73,
Ged.