While there are many antivirus apps for Android devices and they do their job pretty well, the popular, open-source and free ClamAV antivirus still awaits to be ported to the Android platform. Though the ClamAV antivirus is not available for Android, it can still detect some of the harmful trojans that target the Android platform. In fact, if you have ClamAV installed on your Windows, Linux or Mac computers, then you can use ClamAV to scan the Android storage and possibly find some of the harmful files.
Here is how you can use the ClamAV antivirus installed on your PC to scan the Android device storage:
- Connect the Android device to your PC using the standard USB data cable that came with your Android phone. As soon as you connect the cable, you should see a prompt on your Android device’s screen where you can touch the button Turn on USB Storage to connect it in the mass storage mode.
- Wait for the removable disk drives to appear in your PC and note down their drive letter. In my case the Android SD card storage appears as the H: drive.
- Launch ClamAV antivirus in your computer, choose the disk drive letter that belongs to your Android SD card storage and click on the Scan button.
- The ClamAV antivirus will take some time to scan through the contents of the SD card storage and list all the malicious files it detects.
- You can view the detailed report of the scan and manually delete any files that are detected as malicious after the scan is complete.
Conclusion: Even though not specifically designed to work for Android, the ClamAV antivirus can still be used to find some of the malicious files that could cause harm on your Android devices. In fact, ClamAV can detect the viruses that other Android based antivirus apps could not detect.
You can get the Clam antivirus for your PC from http://www.clamav.net/.