14 DAY TRIAL // The development team of the Clam AntiVirus (popularly known as ClamAV) open-source, cross-platform and free antivirus solution has announced today, December 2, 2015, the release of ClamAV 0.99.
ClamAV 0.99 is to be considered an upgrade to version 0.98.7 released back in April 2015. It appears to be a major release of the open-source project, including a great number of new features. Among them, we can mention support for processing YARA rules, along with support for many of YARA's features, including but not limited to alternate strings, YARA string attributes, and Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, in ClamAV's logical signatures.
Furthermore, the on-access scanning has been greatly improved for GNU/Linux operating systems, there's now a new ClamAV API (Application Programming Interface) callback function that can be automatically summoned when the application finds a virus, TIFF files can now be scanned, the Windows pthread library has been updated to version 2.9.1, and LZMA decompression is now supported in Adobe Flash files.
MSO attachments are now supported within Microsoft Office 2003 XML files
Clam AntiVirus 0.99 provides users with support for decrypting zip archives using a configurable default password list, supports MSO attachments in Microsoft Office 2003 XML files, improves the accuracy of the "data loss prevention" heuristic algorithm, and offers an all-new signature target type that can be used for assigning virus signatures to run against unknown file types.
Last but not least, the new ClamAV release introduces the --ascii-normalize option for sigtool, which lets signature authors generate normalized versions of ASCII files more easily. Additionally, Windows users are being informed that the ClamAV installation directory has been changed from \Program Files\Sourcefire\ClamAV to \Program Files\ClamAV or \Program Files\ClamAV-x64.
"PLEASE NOTE: If you are using clamd on-access scanning or have applications using all-match mode, you will want to review the changes and make any necessary adjustments before using ClamAV 0.99. Users of windows binaries need to be aware of the change of installation directories," write the ClamAV developers in the release announcement.
Download ClamAV 0.99 for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia. Below we've attached the internal changelog if you would like to know more about the features implemented in this release. Also, we recommend visiting the project's website for more details on how to get started with Clam AntiVirus.