How To Integrate ClamAV Into PureFTPd For Virus Scanning On Ubuntu 14.04LTS

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme, updated by Srijan Kishore

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into PureFTPd for virus scanning on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS system. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through PureFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

You should have a working PureFTPd setup on your Ubuntu 14.04 server, e.g. as shown in this tutorial: Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Ubuntu 12.10.It is same for both 14.04 & 12.10

Make sure that you are logged in as root (type in

sudo su

to become root), because we must run all the steps from this tutorial as root user.

2 Installing ClamAV

ClamAV can be installed as follows:

apt-get install clamav clamav-daemon clamav-data

Run

freshclam

to download the latest virus signatures, and the start the ClamAV daemon:

service clamav-daemon start

3 Configuring PureFTPd

First we create the file /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/CallUploadScript which simply contains the string yes:

echo "yes" > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/CallUploadScript

Next we create the file /etc/pure-ftpd/clamav_check.sh (which will call /usr/bin/clamdscan whenever a file is uploaded through PureFTPd)...

vi /etc/pure-ftpd/clamav_check.sh

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/clamdscan --remove --quiet --no-summary "$1"

... and make it executable:

chmod 755 /etc/pure-ftpd/clamav_check.sh

Now we edit /etc/default/pure-ftpd-common...

vi /etc/default/pure-ftpd-common

... and change the UPLOADSCRIPT line as follows:

[...]
# UPLOADSCRIPT: if this is set and the daemon is run in standalone mode,
# pure-uploadscript will also be run to spawn the program given below
# for handling uploads. see /usr/share/doc/pure-ftpd/README.gz or
# pure-uploadscript(8)

# example: UPLOADSCRIPT=/usr/local/sbin/uploadhandler.pl
UPLOADSCRIPT=/etc/pure-ftpd/clamav_check.sh
[...]

Finally we restart PureFTPd:

service pure-ftpd-mysql restart

That's it! Now whenever someone tries to upload malware to your server through PureFTPd, the "bad" file(s) will be silently deleted.

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