Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition

[mulepose]

Today, all of a sudden, my free Sophos Antivirus for Mac warned me, that the on-access scanner no longer was running. I tried to restart it from within the Preferences, but get an error message that this could not be done.

Whats wrong and how can this problem be solved? (Tried to uninstall and reinstall but the error persisted)

[mulepose]

Very strange - now the on-access scanner is running as usual. So the problem is (kinda) solved. Anyway, I would like to know what happened. Any suggestions?

[jmw1480]

Same here.  The last two days, the "shield" in the menu bar has gone grey (not black) with a pop-up that says the scanner was no longer running.  About Sophos shows version 7.3.1C, detection engine 3.21.0, threat data 4.67, and release date July 4, 2011 (ironically, 4 days from now).

[Agile]

An update was pushed yesterday to update to 7.3.1 from 7.3.0, and it appears that on-access scanning doesn't get automatically re-enabled for all users after the update.  Select Open Preferences... from the Shield menu, click On-access scanning, authenticate, and click the Start Scanning button and scanning should resume.

[mulepose]

As I wrote in my first post this was exactly what I tried - to restart it under Preferences but it didn't work. That's why I became worried, wondering if some malware had turned off the scanner and blocked it so that it could not be turned on again.

[Agile]

For all other users I've been in contact with, the issue was resolved by letting autoupdate complete another update and/or selecting update now and then re-enabling on-access scanning.

Personally, I have got myself into a position before where I killed InterCheck through some convoluted skullduggery and got into the situation you describe... I was able to fix it that time by ensuring on-access was disabled (not hard when it won't allow anything else), rebooting the computer, running an update check, and then re-enabling it.

[jmw1480]

That did it: turned off scanning, got an error that said preferences had not taken effect (same error I got when trying to turn scanning back on, but just left it off).  Reboot, reopen Sophos preferences, then turned scanning on, VOILA!

[alfredo87]

Hi all,

same problem, tried rebooting,etc. but no luck: it keeps on doing it.

The log is:

com.sophos.intercheck: Fatal Error: Unable to configure virus detection engine [0x001458c0]
com.sophos.intercheck: Sophos Anti-Virus cannot continue

This is bad news for an antivirus software... makes me feel very unsafe!

[Agile]

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alfredo87 wrote:

Hi all,

same problem, tried rebooting,etc. but no luck: it keeps on doing it.

The log is:

com.sophos.intercheck: Fatal Error: Unable to configure virus detection engine [0x001458c0]
com.sophos.intercheck: Sophos Anti-Virus cannot continue

This is bad news for an antivirus software... makes me feel very unsafe!

---

That sounds like a version upgrade may have failed... best bet is to run the uninstaller and then re-download from the website and re-install.  Then reboot to make sure everything is happy.

The good news is that intercheck is noticing that something is wrong and preventing the software from running -- instead of allowing it to be misused by some other process or pretending that everything is still functioning.

[1MacGeek]

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Agile wrote:

That sounds like a version upgrade may have failed... best bet is to run the uninstaller and then re-download from the website and re-install.  Then reboot to make sure everything is happy.

The good news is that intercheck is noticing that something is wrong and preventing the software from running -- instead of allowing it to be misused by some other process or pretending that everything is still functioning.

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This fails for my set-up.

Everything was going along swimingly until today, Sophos just announced it was shutting down with no warning, so I removed it, restarted, download the new version directly from the Sophos website. One more restart after the install just to make sure... and Sophos just stopped dead again. I have removed and restarted a total of three times, with no luck at all. I note the troubles started after I manually initiated an update. I am toying around with removing any network access to prevent any updating and see if Sophos keeps running. If it does after this latest go, then I think we have the culprit. 

Sophos reports - in the logs - I am running updater version 8.0.5, and version 4.79, 02 July 2012 on the AV.