On October 5th, the Clam Antivirus team announced that ClamAV 0.94.x is now entering its end-of-life phase. What’s worse, versions of ClamAV earlier than 0.95 will no longer be able to receive CVD updates; basically rendering any older versions of ClamAV nearly worthless. This is all supposed to happen by April 2010—soon. You can read more about it here.

Good news though, the upgrade process on Ubuntu is pretty easy:

If you haven’t already done so, enable the ‘backports‘ repo by editing your /etc/apt/sources.list file and uncommenting (or, inserting) the following two lines:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse

Then, resynchronize the package index files with the following command:

sudo apt-get update

Next, upgrade ClamAV:

sudo apt-get install clamav-daemon

This command will [sometimes] install apparmor as well; I don’t use apparmor so I uninstall it afterwards:

/etc/init.d/apparmor stop
update-rc.d -f apparmor remove
apt-get remove apparmor apparmor-utils

That’s all there is to it!

root@localhost:~# clamd -V
ClamAV 0.95.2/9874/Thu Oct 8 06:24:12 2009