Schedule Daily Anti-Virus Scan With ClamAV

INTRODUCTION

This will explain how to create a daily cron job to scan the Control Web Panel (CWP) user directories and create a report on AlmaLinux.

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REQUIRMENTS

  • SSH credentials or File Manager access Logged In as Root
  • Text editor of your choice. (The example uses nano)
  • If you need help creating the time for a cron job see: Cron Job Scheduler Helper

PROCEDURE

STEP 1

After logging into the CLI.

Make a directory when the reports will be saved.

In this example, we use /virus-scan-reports:

mkdir /root/virus-scan-reports

STEP 2

Goto the cron jobs directory:

cd /var/spool/cron

STEP 3

Open the ‘root’ cron job:

nano root

STEP 4

In this example (using 2024-08-21), we create a Daily job at 20:22 (8:22 PM), with a Log File going to /root/virus-scan-reports, and a name of virus-scan-report-2024-08-21.txt

At the bottom of the job add (this is all 1 line, NOT 2):

22 20 * * * clamscan --infected --log=/root/virus-scan-reports/virus-scan-report-`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.txt --recursive /home

Save & Exit

Save: Ctrl-O
Exit: Ctrl-X

STEP 5 (Optional, but Recommended)

To test and make sure everything works correctly, it is suggested, you run the command 1 time from /:

clamscan --infected --log=/root/virus-scan-reports/virus-scan-report-`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.txt --recursive /home

Then goto:

cd /root/virus-scan-reports

List the files:

ls

Open report you just created with nano, in this example it was:

nano virus-scan-report-2024-08-21.txt

If all is good, you should see something like:

------------------------------------

----------- SCAN SUMMARY -----------
Known viruses: 8758362
Engine version: 0.103.11
Scanned directories: xxx
Scanned files: xxxx
Infected files: y
Data scanned: x.x MB
Data read: xxxx.x MB (ratio x:z)
Time: xxxx.xxx sec (xx m x s)
Start Date: 2024:08:21 15:46:23
End Date: 2024:08:21 15:57:26

Now, you’ve configured a Daily cron job to run ClamAV to scan all the directories within /home on AlmaLinux.

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KB Article Written: 2024-08-21

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