You can view the documentation below, or browse our GitHub Repository, where you can contribute to user manual and FAQ.
General | Installing ClamAV | How to Report A Bug | Miscellaneous FAQ | ClamAV Virus Database FAQ | End of Life Policy (EOL) | Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA) | Mailing Lists FAQ | Troubleshooting FAQ | Safebrowsing | Upgrading ClamAV | ClamAV on Microsoft Windows FAQ | Which Version of ClamAV should I use? | Uninstalling ClamAV | ClamAV Overview | Interpreting Scan Alerts FAQ | Freshclam FAQ | How do I ignore a ClamAV signature?
Manual | Clam AntiVirus User Manual
Manual | UserManual | Installing ClamAV on Unix / Linux / macOS from Source | Installing ClamAV on Windows | Introduction | LibClamAV | On-Access Scanning | Creating signatures for ClamAV | Usage | ClamAV Development | Contribute
Manual | UserManual | Installation-Unix | Installation on Debian and Ubuntu Linux Distributions | Installation on macOS (Mac OS X) | Installation on Redhat and CentOS Linux Distributions
Manual | UserManual | Signatures | Trusted and Revoked Certificates | Body-based Signature Content Format | Bytecode Signatures | Signatures based on container metadata | Database Info | Dynamic Configuration (DCONF) | Passwords for archive files \[experimental\] | Extended signature format | File Type Magic | ClamAV File Types | Functionality Levels (FLEVELs) | File hash signatures | Logical signatures | PhishSigs | Using YARA rules in ClamAV | Allow list databases
Manual | UserManual | Usage | Configuration | Scanning | Signature Testing and Management
Additional | Microsoft Authenticode Signature Verification | Private Local Mirrors
The following FAQ should help you understand why freshclam
may have failed to fetch the latest updates.
There is a problem with your DNS server. Please check the entries in /etc/resolv.conf
and verify that you can resolve the TXT
record manually:
$ host -t txt current.cvd.clamav.net
If you can’t, it means your network is broken. You’ll be still able to download the updates, but you’ll waste a lot of bandwidth checking for updates. Please note that some not RFC compliant DNS servers (namely the one shipped with the Alcatel (now Thomson) SpeedTouch 510 modem) can’t resolve TXT
record. If that’s the case, please recompile ClamAV with the flag --enable-dns-fix
.
Either your dns servers are not working or you are blocking port 53/tcp
. You should manually check that you can resolve hostnames with:
$ host database.clamav.net
If it doesn’t work, check your dns settings in /etc/resolv.conf
. If it works, check that you can receive dns answers longer than 512 bytes, e.g. check that your firewall is not blocking packets which originate from port 53/tcp
. An easy way to find it out is:
$ dig @ns1.clamav.net db.us.big.clamav.net
For some reason, incremental update failed. Freshclam can recover from this situation by downloading the whole daily.cvd.
For some reason, the content delivery network is not serving the latest updates yet. If you experience this problem, please report the issue on Bugzilla.
It’s not your lucky day. Your network may be down or the ClamAV database content delivery network is experiencing an outage. Please wait a few minutes and try again. Remember to pass the -v
option to freshclam.
Starting from ClamAV 0.9x, whenever your ClamAV engine becomes outdated and the difference between the functionality level required by the CVD and the functionality level supported by your ClamAV engine is more than 3, freshclam will refuse to check for updates more often than 6 times per day.
The reason for this is that bandwidth can be expensive. It is not helpful to generate extra traffic on our content delivery network if you cannot take advantage of all the signatures anyway. If you really care about catching as much malware as possible and you want to check for updates more often than 6 times per day, then you should also not run such an old version of ClamAV.
This message does NOT indicate that you are unable to download the latest CVD update! You’ll get this message whenever a new version of ClamAV is released. In order to detect all the latest viruses, it’s not enough to keep your database up to date. You also need to run the latest version of the scanner.
The functionality level of the database determines which scanner engine version is required to use all of its signatures. If you don’t upgrade immediately you will still be able to download the latest CVD updates but the engine won’t be able to use ALL of them.
If you are experiencing this problem, please do the following: Stop the freshclam
daemon if it’s running, delete both mirrors.dat
and daily.cvd
, then restart the freshclam
daemon. Freshclam will then download a new daily.cvd
and will be up-to-date.
If you are receiving a 403, 503, or 1020 error codes when downloading from Cloudflare, then you are either explicitly blocked, using an EOL’ed version of ClamAV or you are downloading incorrectly. After checking that you are using a current version of ClamAV, please discontinue whatever method of download you are using and immediately move to using either FreshClam or cvdupdate. These are the two supported methods for downloading AV updates from ClamAV. All other methods may be rate limited, or blocked at our discretion. Use of Wget, Curl, or other command line tools that are scripted are explicitly denied.
If you are receiving a 429, that means you are rate limited. You’re downloading too fast or too much. Please use Freshclam or cvdupdate. If you are using a shared hosting provider, like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Computing, Oracle, Azure, etc, you will most likely be rate limted, however cvdupdate should handle this gracefully. If you continue to receive these, we recommend you try from a different external IP address.
If you are receiving a 403 specifically on the safebrowsing.cvd file, please read this blog post immediately!
Are you running a version of FreshClam/ClamAV lower than 0.103.2
? If so, you should upgrade to at least 0.103.2 immediately.
If you have checked all of the above and you are still seeing errors, please open a ticket using the below link
Please report freshclam update failures or issues on Bugzilla.