Hallo!

I am using ClamWin 0.92. When looking at Help > About, there is the number of 218.395 "Known viruses". When I do a Memory Scan, then Logfile says, ClamWin has 215.099 Known viruses.

Which number of viruses is right?

Greetings from

Matthew

I think the "official' number of signatures is on the ClamAV main page at https://www.clamav.net/ on the Web. That for the moment is the 218,000. They are adding signatures like mad lately--as are most of the antivirus companies. In fact, for antivirus software with fancy heuristics, the detection rate for malware caught by signatures seems to be getting closer to the rate for their heuristics.

Regards,

I've noticed the same phenomenon.
The number of known viruses in the about window (which is the 'real' total number of signatures you can see on the ClamAV webpage) differs from the number of known viruses that is displayed in the report window after a virus scan.

At this moment:

Protecting from (About-window): 232353 viruses
Known viruses (Report-window): 228880

A difference of 3473

Should be fixed!

No responses?
What is the reason for that difference?

Potentially unwanted applications, add
--detect-pua
to your clamwin additional clamscan parameters.

Also...Clam detects much more than 128,000 or so signatures--due to generic signatures. That's why the number of signatures is a bit misleading. In a recent test (see https://www.virusbtn.com/news/2008/03_13a.xml) Clam found about 85% of 1,130,556 separate malwares. Most of the commercial AVs found in the 90% range, but to me, 85% is still pretty good!

Regards,

Maybe it`s interesting:

The difference in the number of the viruses is varying:

- 3488
- 3492
- 3438
- 3465
- 3466
- 3460
- 3517
- 3522
- 3524

Greetings from
Matthew

Did you enable PUA in the ClamWin options?

What ist PUA?
Do I find it somewhere in "preferences"?

Greetings from
Matthew

PUA = Potentially Unwanted Applications

You can find it in the Advanced tab of Preferences.

Hallo!


Thank you for your tipp! I have used the Memory Scan twice.

With disabled PNU: Difference: 3525 viruses

With enabled PNU: Difference: 2905 viruses


Couldn`t anyone of you verify the same "mistake"?

Greetings from
Matthew

I guess we could have done so. To me, however, it's not really that important--they are always doing some "housekeeping." In addition, the number of signatues isn't really a good indication any more of the number of viruses/malware that can be detected due to generic/family signatures. Clam recently caught nearly 78% of over a million viruses in a recent test. See https://www.sunbelt-software.com/ihs/alex/Results_2D2008m3b_US.xls_detection2.htm on the Web.

Regards,