Sophos Free Mac Antivirus Home Edition Hangs Huawei MT-841 Modem

Hi all,

Impressed with Sophos Antivirus for Android, I installed  Free Mac  Antivirus Home Edition of Sophos on my MBP.

Remarkably I have come acrross an interesting issue,

My ADSL 2+ Huawei modem hangs cause of Anti Virus !!

Before some one says to check my networkk set up, let me clear some things about me,

I am a full time developer / reverse engineer and Red Hat Certified , so I have some Networking knowledge to come to this conclusion.

My Network Connection is as follows,

ISP --> Huawei ADSL 2+  MT841 Modem/Router (DHCP disabled & Firewall disabled) --> ASUS N10+ (DDWRT - DHCP enabled ) --> iMac and Macbook

My Setup -

1. Free Mac  Antivirus Home Edition of Sophos installed on my Mac Book .

2. My Macbook has  OSX Lion 10.7.4 with internal firewall and Little snitch  enabled.

Issue :

1. The modem hangs in 1 - 2 hrs after the boot of Mac Book and Anti Virus running.

Troubleshooting Followed :

I followed the following troubleshooting methodology for two days before arriving at the conclusion.

1. Checked by removing the router between the modem and MBP and connected directly to modem - issue occurs in 1-2 hrs.

2.  Disabled / Enabled DHCP servers on modem and router alternatively - issue not resolved.

3. Reset / Restored default settings in modem - issue occurs back in 1-2 hrs.

Temporary Fix :

1 . Modem restarted , the issue occues after 1-2 Hrs.

Permanent Solution :

1. Uninstalled  Free Mac  Antivirus Home Edition . - Modem works perfect .

Observations :

1. My Huawei MT 841 modem has been working great for 7 years with no issues so far . But  I could find a 2008  thread on the same modem having same  issue with Trend Micro Internet security  on a  Windows OS. That was an official bug in Trend Micro AV related to global threat sense technology in it.

2 . Free Mac  Antivirus Home Edition of Sophos had a similar Threat sense technology connecting to global servers, I wonder whether it causes my modem to hang.

Conclusion :

Sophos products are great no doubt on that, Free Mac  Antivirus Home Edition of Sophos looked promising it even detected windows virus from the parallels desktop VM. But I cannot continue using it unless the bug which causes my modem to hang gets resolved. It would be intresting to know how the Antivirus could cause a modem across the router to hang.

Looking for answers from Sophos support. I have mailed them, will soon post their reply.

Thanks.