Installation failed - 6 times!!

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NaomiH wrote:

Sorry for delayed reply - I wasn't around to look at the board.

I looked at the Wikipedia page but there was no link to download the file, just a text string in the body of the page. The article says it runs on MS and OS/2, doesn't mention Mac OS at all. I went to the EICAR site and downloaded the file. When I ran Sophos from the Applications folder it detected the "threat" and cleaned it up.

So does that mean it's just the icon in the menu bar that's not working. If so, how can I switch it on? and what's the difference between on-demand and on-access scanning? Sorry if that seems like a stupid question, but I've never needed an antivirus program before and I've been a Mac user since 1985!

OSX version: I have 10.6.8.

Thanks for your advice so far, hope you can steer me through this, I'm not very well up in this stuff.

Naomi

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I'll attempt to answer the questions one at a time.

Eicar doesn't actually "run" on any platform; it is a harmless series of bytes agreed upon by most AW companies to act as a test file.  As such, it is the best file to use to test the basic functionality of any AV software.

This does mean that on-access scanning is working for you.  There are a number of threads on this forum discussing reasons why the menu icon may not show up for you: the basic one is that it has been turned off in the preferences of Sophos Anti-Virus.  Alternatively, it may not show up if there isn't enough room on the menu bar, or if certain login conditions exist.

On-Demand scans are usually run from within the Sophos Anti-Virus application itself; there's a general scan, and you can also create custom scans.  These are usually "deeper" scans that dig deep into archives, and scan all available files in the section of the file system being scanned.

On-Access scans scan each file prior to access by the operating system -- when they are opened for reading or writing, from/to the hard drive.

I'm impressed that you made it through the 1987 to 1994 period of the Macintosh system without encountering any viruses... most people ran Disinfectant Init (gold shield with a V in the middle) during this period due to the prevalence of viruses such as WDEF-A, MDEF-A and nVIR-B.  Of course, I guess if you weren't in a networked environment and didn't share floppies, you were unlikely to be infected.

As an aside, I always thought WDEF-A was one of the most interesting viruses of the time, as all you needed to do to clean it up was rebuild your desktop by holding down command-option while launching the Finder.   This deleted the Desktop DB file where the infected WDEF resource was located.  When the Macintosh systems with the new multiple-DB desktop files were released, WDEF viruses could no longer infect the new format, and the problem dried up relatively quickly.

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NaomiH wrote:

Sorry for delayed reply - I wasn't around to look at the board.

I looked at the Wikipedia page but there was no link to download the file, just a text string in the body of the page. The article says it runs on MS and OS/2, doesn't mention Mac OS at all. I went to the EICAR site and downloaded the file. When I ran Sophos from the Applications folder it detected the "threat" and cleaned it up.

So does that mean it's just the icon in the menu bar that's not working. If so, how can I switch it on? and what's the difference between on-demand and on-access scanning? Sorry if that seems like a stupid question, but I've never needed an antivirus program before and I've been a Mac user since 1985!

OSX version: I have 10.6.8.

Thanks for your advice so far, hope you can steer me through this, I'm not very well up in this stuff.

Naomi

---

I'll attempt to answer the questions one at a time.

Eicar doesn't actually "run" on any platform; it is a harmless series of bytes agreed upon by most AW companies to act as a test file.  As such, it is the best file to use to test the basic functionality of any AV software.

This does mean that on-access scanning is working for you.  There are a number of threads on this forum discussing reasons why the menu icon may not show up for you: the basic one is that it has been turned off in the preferences of Sophos Anti-Virus.  Alternatively, it may not show up if there isn't enough room on the menu bar, or if certain login conditions exist.

On-Demand scans are usually run from within the Sophos Anti-Virus application itself; there's a general scan, and you can also create custom scans.  These are usually "deeper" scans that dig deep into archives, and scan all available files in the section of the file system being scanned.

On-Access scans scan each file prior to access by the operating system -- when they are opened for reading or writing, from/to the hard drive.

I'm impressed that you made it through the 1987 to 1994 period of the Macintosh system without encountering any viruses... most people ran Disinfectant Init (gold shield with a V in the middle) during this period due to the prevalence of viruses such as WDEF-A, MDEF-A and nVIR-B.  Of course, I guess if you weren't in a networked environment and didn't share floppies, you were unlikely to be infected.

As an aside, I always thought WDEF-A was one of the most interesting viruses of the time, as all you needed to do to clean it up was rebuild your desktop by holding down command-option while launching the Finder.   This deleted the Desktop DB file where the infected WDEF resource was located.  When the Macintosh systems with the new multiple-DB desktop files were released, WDEF viruses could no longer infect the new format, and the problem dried up relatively quickly.