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Sophos Triggering a Virus that takes all disk space

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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  • 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
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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
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