For a few days I have been unable to reliably update the virus definitions on any of my household PC's,
My laptop, wife's laptop, 2 x desktop machines and the children's PC's as well.

Today I noticed that I was unable to browse to http://www.clamav.net/lang/en/
Also, as an example, I was unable to browse to the Sophos web site.

I read Lipper's post at the end of topic http://forums.clamwin.com/viewtopic.php?t=3174

Lipper advises...

You can test for a Conficker infection by visiting
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html

Sure enough, running this html test and it advises I have a Conficker worm infection,

I Then downloaded the Conficker removal tool from
http://download.cnet.com/Conficker-Removal-Tool/3000-2239_4-10911447.html

and ran it. It identifies the Conficker worm and informs me that the computer will need a number of restarts to entirely remove it.
All done, the test referred to above passes and I can now visit clamwin.net and Sophos on the web.

Also, more importantly, Clamwin now updates properly.

I hope that by posting this, someone finds it interesting and useful.

Phil.
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Thanks for the information. You don't hear much about Conficker now, but it is still around.

The Clam AV sigmakers don't quite get the variety of virus submissions that the commercial AVs get, and they have a bit of a backlog. If you are using ClamWin as your only AV, you might consider getting a real-time scanner and using ClamWin as a backup, where it performs best. If you want to use ClamWin as a real-time scanner, the ClamSentinel project (a separate project from ClamWin) lets you do that. ClamSentinel is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/clamsentinel/ on the web. Sentinel uses ClamWin's signatures for real-time scanning, but it also has its own heuristic scanner that can detect a majority of viruses for which ClamWin does not have a signature. Read the Simple Guide that comes with the download package before installing Sentinel.

Regards,

Thanks MJ0JER! The post is absolutely great! Lots of great information and inspiration, Also like to admire the time and effort you put into it..