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!

The future of the ClamAV safebrowsing database

ClamAV has provided a signature database using Google's Safebrowsing API to provide advanced protection against emails with links to suspicious websites.

As of Nov. 11, 2019, we have stopped updating the Safebrowsing signature database because Google announced changes to their Safebrowsing API terms of service.

Google now requires commercial users to use the Google Web Risk API, a for-profit feature, instead of the Safebrowsing API. Though ClamAV itself is free and open-source, we cannot continue to provide Google Safebrowsing data to the general public.

Today, we're pleased to open-source a new tool for users to generate their own safebrowsing signature databases using their personal Safebrowsing API credentials for use in accordance with the policies of the Safebrowsing API user agreement.

Please check out the clamav-safebrowsing repository on Github to get started.

ClamAV is currently experiencing issues with the safebrowsing CVD

We are currently experiencing issues with the safebrowsing publishing system.  This means that we are not able to currently publish a new safebrowsing.cvd file.

We are working on resolving the issue and will post an update when this is corrected.