First report of 178 Virus Threats in Sophos Free for Mac

Question

I just switched from MacScan to Sophos free for Macs at the suggestion of my Mac user group. In 20 minutes today it gave a warning of nearly 50 virus threats. It asked me run a scan, which I did, and it then reported 178 threats total. However, when I now open Quarantine, it shows nothing! When I spot-checked the reports that all said "clean up manually" they all said they were for only for Windows OS. I thought I downloaded the Mac virus protection! Sophos would not clean up the four reports that merely said "Clean Up" - I tried over and over.

All the instructions seem to be for Windows, not Mac. It says to delete the viruses where they reside. How do I find out WHERE they reside? Sophos also said the one sample file I emailed them was not malicious and I should "authorize it." What the heck does that mean? Also said something about HIPS - have no idea what that is. Sophos support won't answer anything since this is the free version. They said to work with my IT dept. - I am a one-man business. Why do they distribute virus protection for Windows but call it for Macs? Is there any way to identify only Mac malware and viruses? I followed the "How to remove..." instructions explicitly; Restart never appeared, and cleaned-up threats were never deleted from the list as it says they are.

My website was just hacked recently for the second time so naturally I'm extremely concerned about these reports.

NEXT DAY: Am I going to get any response whatever? The Sophos tech support merely sends boilerplate refusals to help in any way - they won't even answer why the supposed virus security software for Macs seems to be only for WINDOWS! What in the world am I to do with the 178 Virus Threats I got, which now have disappeared from the Quarantine? I'm afraid to send out any vital emails. If I agree to pay some $ can I actually get professional answers to my questions? And approximately How Much??

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Agile · Accepted Answer

Thanks for the well thought-out response.  I'll attempt to answer your unresolved concerns in reverse order. Enterprise support is for Enterprise products only; it is not available for our Home product.  Descriptions and trial access to our Enterprise products are available here: http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/buy-now.aspx .  Make sure to try the trials before committing money to the product, as many of the components are Microsoft Windows product-centric. The Help I was referring to is in the application itself, in the Help menu.  As I mentioned, "authorize" is a term applied to the Sophos Enterprise Console, which is not available with the Home product. A search on this forum will probably help you with any Quarantine and cleaning issues much more than reading the admittedly terse cleanup instructions on the website, as it contains detailed responses to many situations people have encountered who didn't find the instructions on the website helpful. The sentence regarding business-grade protection is saying that you get the same protection as a business user, but for free, if you're using it for personal home use only.  It does not say that the product is a business product.  This could be misleading, as the protection mentioned is the actual data protection, not the support contract or other integrated security protection of the enterprise product.  What it is generalizing is that the actual protection engine in the product is identical to what you'll find in the Enterprise product, and is fed the same protection data from SophosLabs.  SophosLabs employs people to (among other things) look at Enterprise customer submissions and hand analyze them; the results of this analysis are rolled into the detection updates which the Home users benefit from. And lastly, I can definitely understand why this was a frustrating experience.  I'm confident that this discussion thread will be used by the company to improve future customer experience. :1003481