Sophos Antivirus IS A Virus

Hello PhillyD,

Pretty harsh criticism although I expect you are frustrated. You need to provide a lot more detail if you want some assistance.

Please see original unanswered post here openforum.sophos.com/.../12914

Hello PhillyD,

There is zero possiblity our update contained malious code.

Its unfortunate that your computer is not working well, but I'm glad you found a solution.

I can assure you that Sophos has excellent support for our Mac product for our business customers. We offer a free version of our security software to the Mac community, and its highly regarded as a quality product. But "free" also means we can't afford to offer interactive technical support for it. So we provide this forum, hoping the community will support each other (similar to other free software communities).

Want to guarantee our software is not installed on your system? Run these commands in a Terminal window:

kextstat | grep -i sophos

launchctl list | grep -i sophos

sudo launchctl list | grep -i sophos

ps -ef | grep -i sophos

ps -ef | grep -i intercheck

On a system that has no Sophos software install, all of those commands will return empty results. Assuming you really have removed our software, then your computer crashes cannot be blamed on our product.

None of the commands I've listed above are harmful to your computer (they simply show information about your running system). If you aren't familiar with the Terminal, or aren't familiar with the commands I've listed above, then I can provide more detail.

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PhillyD wrote:

...the pop-up every 3 seconds, but my machine is still buggy. I cannot open Chrome, Word, Excel, many websites or any of the other programs I need daily. Sophos has no Mac support, and nobody has responded to this query for help.

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What pop-up are you seeing? You don't describe it!  Better yet Grab it.

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PhillyD wrote:

My only conclusion is that Sophos neither knows much about Mac or wants to help or support Mac Users.

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You post 'pop-up', 'buggy' and vague problems with opening applications (they don't open?, open with an error? open then error and close?).  Who can help with that!  Hang on...where is it...I had that Ouija board around here somewhere....darn it, nope can't find it.

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PhillyD wrote:

even more astonishing to discover that my first Mac virus was carried into my machine on the back of an anti-virus program. Now that's a first - an antivirus that IS a virus.

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Utter ballz.

I does sound like you're peed off and fed up and I would be too if a piece of software screwed up my Mac and I knew for def. that it was that software.  However I think you're aiming your temper at Sophos when it's not their fault.  If your Mac was running sweet before you installed SAV and immediately blew up after the installation then sounds like it could be SAV.  However without knowing what else was running on the computer, where the installer came from, what the checksum of the download was...you can't blame Sophos.  Plus there could have been malware on the computer and SAV gets installed and the malware - in its death throes - damages the machine (guessing - who really knows now).

Now SAV is gone from the computer is it running OK?

Here's the thing... your company shouldn't make a product that only you have an admin password for... the end user should be able to modify your silly antivirus... after removing your product by force, all my USB drivers became corrupted. You didn't package an uninstaller or at least one I could find for the trial version of endpoint, and after nearly losing my machine today, I was able to restore to a time when I still had sophos on my system. I cannot run the risk of losing an entire day again trying to get rid of your crappy malware.. so... if anyone at Sophos is reading this.. call me at +19012884700 so we can properly get this removed from my machine... without losing USB functionality or corrupting GUID tables.. thanks!

Hello mdanielson007,

Your situation is very odd indeed, as we do not install a special administrator password - our installer and GUI software requires you to enter your own personal administrator password (the one used to administrate your Mac). Due to the (very good) design of OS X, our software *never* sees your administrator password. And I really mean *never* sees or reads it. Every time we prompt for administrator rights, we are doing it through the standard OS X system which performs the actual password entry and verification.

I am very skeptical that simply attempting to remove our software would corrupt your system in the ways you've described. We have always and will always install the removal program at the same time as the rest of the software. Any administrator can run it (it does prompt for your Mac's administrator credentials as described above). Simply run the remove program. Most of the time you don't even need to reboot. For the Home Edition, its installed into the /Applications directory. Find it and run it.

If you are not the authorized administrator of your Mac e.g. someone else is, then we cannot be held responsible for anyone acting against the wishes of the authorized owner of the Mac. Sorry.

Sophos has not done any of that on the many machines I've installed it on. (note: the intercheck process can occasionally take over the processor, which is what I'm looking into right now. But that's different.)

Now, MacKeeper, that is arguably an evil piece of go shi. Just google it.

If anything, it's MacKeeper screwing up your Mac. And if it hasn't yet, it will. Just do a search for "mackeeper site:discussions.apple.com" If you like its A-V, that's because it's the absolutely free Avira, which they've "borrowed" (maybe they have some deal with Avira--I have no idea), and for which you're now paying.