ClamAV has come a long way from being the reason a small Polish college was the target of a distributed denial-of-service attack. Today, 20 years after our first release, we’re proud that ClamAV is instead known for preventing these types of attacks on thousands of devices around the world.
After many releases, updates, bugs and late nights from our developers, ClamAV is proud to celebrate its 20th anniversary this week. We’re celebrating by inching closer to the long-anticipated 1.0 release and continuing to test our release candidate for 0.105.0.
Tomasz Kojm, the original creator of ClamAV, released the first 0.10 version of the open-source anti-virus engine on May 8, 2002, with the goal of making the internet safer at large and helping users filter out spam from their email inboxes. At the time, he was hosting the virus databases on his college and previous high school’s servers in Poland. Unfortunately, this led to a DoS condition on these pages because it was so popular, which Kojm told us via email he wishes he could have avoided. But if nothing else, this at least was an important lesson for Kojm and his co-creators to build off.