Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Are you still attempting to download safebrowsing.cvd?

 It has come to our attention that a few of you (about 515,000 of you, to be more accurate), are still attempting to download the safebrowsing.cvd file from the official ClamAV mirrors.  This tells us that these attempted downloads are an installation of FreshClam (a non-updated FreshClam.conf or other script) that have not been updated to remove the safebrowsing database. 

We discontinued the distribution of the SafeBrowsing database in November of 2019, as indicated in our blog post back in June, however these installations of ClamAV that have no updated and continue to download the safebrowsing.cvd account for nearly 10TB of traffic a month, just for that file.

As a result, we have put in a block to make any attempts to download the safebrowsing.cvd result in a 403 error.

Please take a look at your FreshClam.conf file, in our upcoming version of ClamAV (0.103.2 and beyond), we have removed all of the code that attempts to download the safebrowsing db from our servers, (so you should update) however, for those of you can't update right away, please find this line:

SafeBrowsing yes

In your Freshclam.conf file, and commenting it out like this:

#SafeBrowsing yes

Thank you for your support of ClamAV!