I have been running Sophos in the background on my Mac machines for some years. Recently I suspected some problems, so checked again, and indeed ran another virus checker, which highlighted some potential problems, but did not find anything new.
After this I installed Sophos on my wife's Macbook Air. Today we noted that PDF files from some sites would not download on her machines, and also she reported that the machine itself had gone very slow since installing the Sophos software.
I switched back to my Macbook Pro, and found that I could also not download some PDFs, so I uninstalled Sophos which then enabled the download. We also established that downloading the PDFs to iPads works.
As a consequence I am at present uninstalling the Sophos tool from several machines, and from other family machines.
Until today I assumed that Sophos would have low impact, and do more good than harm, but it was essential that the PDFs, which we believe to be from trusted sites, are downloaded.
This is a shame, as I have over some time noted that Sophos does trap some files which might cause problems, most likely on Windows machines. I also note that recently some malware which causes browser redirection to unwanted sites seems to have been created, and this can affect Macs as well as PCs, and perhaps even Linux systems. I was able to spot this using malware detection tools, and remove some files which seemed to be causing problems.
Some have reported that there is no need for AV software on Macs, but I don't believe that this is completely true, and it seems to me that threats are increasing. However, not being able to download PDFs from trusted sites is a major problem.
Even being able to temporarily disable Sophos to permit such important files to be downloaded woudl be helpful, but the only way we found to get the essential files was to uninstall the Sophos software.
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