For the past two days, my data usage has increased even though I did nothing more than normal data surfing. I installed nethogs and found this application (/usr/bin/freshclam) drinking my data ridiculously. Can anyone help me with this? What is this and how can I completely remove it?
One more thing I wonder If any application can upload my documents data to its server without my permission (it would be a nightmare).
Freshclam is the clamav database updater. You can reduce the amount of times that it goes out and updates the clamav database anywhere from 0 times a day (no updates) to however many you want. 12 times a day means once every 2 hours. Right now, it is probably set to 24 times (once per hour).
To set it run:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure clamav-freshclam
You can also set freshclam to a manual update by setting the Virus database update method: on the second screen of sudo dpkg-reconfigure clamav-freshclam to manual.
After the above is set, then simply run sudo freshclam to update:
$ sudo freshclam
Mon Jan 20 17:16:09 2020 -> ClamAV update process started at Mon Jan 20 17:16:09 2020
Mon Jan 20 17:16:09 2020 -> daily.cld database is up to date (version: 25701, sigs: 2150284, f-level: 63, builder: raynman)
Mon Jan 20 17:16:09 2020 -> main.cld database is up to date (version: 59, sigs: 4564902, f-level: 60, builder: sigmgr)
Mon Jan 20 17:16:09 2020 -> bytecode.cvd database is up to date (version: 331, sigs: 94, f-level: 63, builder: anvilleg)
Hope this helps!
I had the same problem, my daily data was used up within hours of tethering. The culprit was an out-of-date version of ClamAV. Due to the older version, Freshclam was unable to download the database updates. In my case, the database update was 150 MB and it was failing after downloading 40 MB, and Freshclam would retry after 5 seconds to download again.
I updated the ClamAV version through Software Updater and this fixed the issue.
