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Sophos Triggering a Virus that takes all disk space

kellywsmith

I have discovered a problem in running your software. This is happened on 2 different Macintosh computers (although one is just a migration of the information on the other). When I use your Sophos program to scan my hard disk for viruses, everything goes along fine until it reaches a certain number of around 197,000 (that number does not matter).

It is there that it stalls and appears to be working on a very large file. The reality is that it seems to trigger some sort of virus that completely fills up the empty space on my hard drive in about 20-30 minutes, until I get a warning that I have run out of disk space. Then I have to force quit my computer as I am unable to save files or even quit programs. Again, this happened twice and when I tried it a third time, I shut it down before it filled my hard disk again. 

Please advise me on the best solution to this problem. I don't want to run it again as I have already caused enough problems with it and the virus has not yet been removed. 

:1006057


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  • 0

    This is no virus... it is decompressing an archive and scanning the contents.  Turn off "scan inside archives and compressed files" and the problem will go away.  However, you won't have scanned inside archives and compressed files.

    It sounds like you have a very large archive in the scan path.

    :1006091
  • 0

    Okay, I will try your suggestion, but I personally don't think it will work because I do not know of any such large archive in my hard drive.

    Thank you for helping with this issue.

    :1006097
  • 0

    Here Sophos, tell me if this 57 MB DMG that Disk Utility says is fine really needs more than my SSD's available 77 GB to decompress:

    http://neverball.org/ > Download > neverball-1.5.3.dmg

    If not, then it's a bug in the scanner.  Took me all day to find because I couldn't figure out how to determine which file the scanner was "working" on; all I could do was slowly iterate with the scanner over different sets of directories.   If there is faster way, *please* let me know.

    Tried 8.0.2C and 7.3.10C on a MacBook2,1 with 10.6.8 and 3 GB RAM.

    :1006351
  • 0

    Agile, I am having a similar issue but your response to kellywsmith doesn't seem quite right, at least not for my situation. I have compressed files on my hard drive but nothing of substantial size (the largest being a few gb at most), yet when running a scan I can go from over 200gb of free space to 0 in less than half an hour. This just does not seem right. Is there something else going on?

    :1007311
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    Yup... do you have any DMGs on your drive?  A DMG can be set up as a sparse image with a small file on it, but when the image was created, it could be set to be any size.  For example, the game Neverball comes in a DMG named neverball-1.5.3.dmg -- the DMG is 52MB, the game itself isn't much larger, but the image inside is 300GB if I remember correctly.  Most of that space is zeros, but the entire image gets unpacked for scanning.

    :1007327
  • 0

    Well, I do have some but mostly they are either DVD disc images, or smaller utility-style apps (such as text editors, anti-virus, et cetera). Nothing to the best of my knowledge that would be that large. I am intrigued that a 52mb DMG could contain 300gb of data. That's some powerful compression algorithm.

    I also find it interesting that everything I post here contains nothing but text, yet everytime I try to post I get a hassle because (supposedly) there is "invalid html in the message body". If there is, the forum software is putting it there. But I guess that is for another thread, eh?

    :1007345
  • 0

    There doesn't seem to be an option to disable scanning within archives in the (latest) version of Sophos for Mac that I downloaded.

    So how can this be disabled? I too was surprised with scanner consuming all my free space :///

  • 0 in reply to David Krmpotic

    http://i65.tinypic.com/lel44.png[/IMG]:320:240] [IMG]i65.tinypic.com/.../IMG]

  • 0 in reply to brvx

    Thank you but I have no idea how to access this control panel. The button "Home Dashboard" from my Sophos MacOS app opens a WEBSITE https://home.sophos.com/ and all the options (which don't include the ones depicted at your screenshot are shown as part of the web app)! 

  • 0 in reply to David Krmpotic

    You should find all that in Preferences. But it sounds like you may not be running the same version. See community.sophos.com/.../sophos-home-for-mac-sophos-anti-virus-for-mac-home-edition-confusion

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