Sophos ERROR__SCANNING_FILES thumbnails in /tmp on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Hi Michael Schreiber 

The thumbnails are created by Nautilus which is the older file manager in gnome. There are no recent changes made to affect the scanning of the files. Are there any recent changes been made in your environment? Alternatively, you can exclude /tmp/.gnome_desktop_thumbnail.*  to avoid error messages which comes with the inherent additional risk. Sophos does not recommend to exclude any such file types in temp. You can try to re-install it once and check if error re-appears, as we have not seen such errors from our end. 

This exact thing started happening to me as well. No changes to my environment have been made. 

Hello,

please see knowledgebase https://community.sophos.com/kb/en-us/117403

There the problem is explained.

Thanks

Linuxa

I finally figured out this annoying problem by carefully reading the manual.  The proper command is:

sudo /opt/sophos-av/bin/savconfig add ExcludeFileOnGlob '/tmp/.gnome_desktop_thumbnail.*'

Note, you use ExcludeFileOnGlob which expands the * wildcard.  AND, you must enclose the target in quotes.  If you don't, you will only exclude existing thumbnails.

Note, this does allow a virus to enter as a thumbnail.  Use at your own risk.