Q: Eratic access to Safari and Firefox
I recently downloaded and successfully installed the Sophos Antivirus for Mac Home Edition. I have run the program and it reported a number of corrupt files (all mobile documents). It also reported around 8 or 9 threats which I chose to Cleanup which it did fine. All seems fine except that I now have one issue which I am not sure what to do about. Access to some web pages in either Safari or Firefox is now erratic and Safari reports messages like “Safari can’t open the page “https://webmail.1and1.co.uk because Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server “webmail.1and1.co.uk”.” Firefox reports a similar message that “The connection was reset while the page was loading”. If I retry and perhaps even restart the apps it sometimes goes through OK. It is not consistent and not on all web sites. Can anyone help me please as it appears as though I may have inadvertently removed/cleaned up a required file as all was working fine before the running of the app.
I am running an iMac 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 processor with 16GB RAM and using OSX 10.9.5
The version of Anti-Virus I am using is Home Edition 9.4.0, Threat Detection Engin 3.61.0 Threat Data: 5.19
Thanks
Jeff Robins
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 - 16GB RAM
Posted on Oct 2, 2015 10:56 AM
The anti virus software is the culprit.
Follow the instructions for uninstalling Sohphos > How to remove Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac
Then restart your Mac and try Safari and Firefox.
Gatekeeper is pre installed on your Mac to prevent malware.
Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy then select the General tab.
Make sure Mac App Store and identified developers is selected. If that area is grayed out, click the padlock icon to proceed.
Anything else is overkill on a Mac.
Posted on Oct 3, 2015 3:16 AM