I have a Mac Mini purchased in late 2012. My problem is Sophos stopped running mid scan. Says issues detected but won't finish scan so issues go to quarantine. I am on version OS X Yosemite. Processor 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5. Memory 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3. What do I need to do?
Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)
Uninstall Sophos. I used to use but had many problems so I just uninstalled it.
moriahw wrote:
What do I need to do?
Uninstall Sophos and consider up-grading your RAM to 8, 10 or 16 GB.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Apple/Mac_mini/DDR3_1600
Replacing one 2GB module with an 8GB module and running 10GB will help a lot, if you can not afford a 16GB kit.
The latest version of Sophos is 9.4 although right now they are in the middle of switching users from 9.2.8 to 9.4 and some Macs will not have made the switch as yet.
If items are listed in Quarantine then those are 'completed'. It is then up to you to chose whether to authorise them i.e. if you think they are not malware, or to tell Sophos to 'clean them up' if you think they are. In general cleaning them up means it will delete them.
You could then run a scan after this to see if it finds any more.
Sophos gets good scores in comparison reviews and my own experience is that it is pretty good, certainly compared to ugh! McAfee and Symantec.
There is increasing amounts of Mac malware and while the effectiveness of (Mac) anti-virus products maybe arguable it is also good manners to prevent sending Windows malware to people even if it would not affect your own Mac. If your a business it is almost compulsory so as to avoid accidentally passing malware to clients and risking loosing the customer.
PS. The thing with Sophos that most annoys me is that it will spot malware in a Time Machine backup, however it cannot clean the Time Machine backup up, and it also it seems cannot be configured to ignore the Time Machine backup. As a result you will effectively continuously get nag messages about 'quarantined' files which are actually in the Time Machine backup which you can do nothing about. 😠 The reason malware gets into the Time Machine backup is that typically you get an email with a malware attachment, this is initially a 'new' variety not recognised by Sophos, it gets backed up by Time Machine, and then later after a virus definition update Sophos learns it is malware and starts triggering these annoying messages. Each time Time Machine thereafter does a backup it compares to the existing backup which triggers a file access which triggers Sophos. 😠
How do I go about uninstalling Sophos?
Sophos stopped running mid scan. Says issues detected but won't finish scan so issues go to quarantine
