Sophos sees OS X virus ghosts
Tom Sanders in California, 22 Feb 2006
Anti-virus software mistakes real applications for pests, breaks systems
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I just laughed so much I nearly choked on my cornflakes
First of all MacFan, fire your "IT guy" as he is obviously completely clueless. Who on earth would run AV software with the delete function set and not quarantine !
Secondly, those of you that claim that Sophos cry wolf and make the virus' themselves well you are just completely nuts I am afraid.
In over 10 years of using and selling Sophos AV I have never seen a single false positive, let alone one on the magnitude of this one, this has been really unfortunate and I am sure internally someone in Quality Assurance at the company will lose their job over this.
Companies like Sophos are under immense pressures to protect their clientbases as quickly as possible, especially as the time between a vulnerability being found and being exploited can has dropped to in some cases hours, and the speed that some virus spread is frightening.
I think sadly those idiots that write virus' will place more attention on the Mac OS in the future as it becomes more popular as a desktop OS, if you think these virus companies are here to hurt you then don't bother with any AV, personally I do trust them.
Posted by: xplodenet.com, 26 Feb 2006It screwed my system
Tuesday morning, my Sophos software claimed my Mac was infected with Inqtana-B. My IT guy came and ran a full scan with the option of deleting the infected files. 2 hours and 1200 deleted files later, my system was crap. No Adobe, Macromedia, or Microsoft apps would run, and even the Mac OS didn't know how to re-install applications (didn't know what to do with a mpkg). IT guys ended up wiping the entire hard drive and reinstalling OS X. Thanks Sophos!
Posted by: Mac Fan, 23 Feb 2006Caution is wise, but virus vendors have a clear self-interest
It would be unwise to expect no security threats ever to any OS, but I have to confess that I see companies like Sophos, Symantec, F-Secure, etc as functionally equivalent to botnets, hackers, adware and spyware vendors, etc. For about four years now they have been making SUCH A FUSS about THREATS TO OSX, yet in that period not a single thing happened. They are guilty of crying wolf so often, methinks they doth protest too much. It's quite clear that they see the Mac market as largely untapped, and they feel they deserve those dollars. So they make daily announcements meant to terrify all of us to rush to their products. It's so incredibly transparent that they are operating to a vested interest, and if I were them I'd be incredibly concerned about my company's public image.
Unless these organizations can find a measured, indutry-accepted standards-based way to improve their credibility, I think they may actually be more of a threat to us, as they produce so much background noise we may actually miss out, or dismiss a real event when it comes along.
Posted by: Philip Owens, 22 Feb 2006Understatement of the year
These are not the only items it marked as "infected". Nearly every plug in on my system was deemed infected. On top of that every printer PPD, iTunes files, you name it. To say it was only Microsoft Office and Adobe is a drastic understatement.
Posted by: Kelly, 22 Feb 2006I think I'd rather have a virus than Sophos AV
I mean, which one would do more damage?
Posted by: My name is Earl, 22 Feb 2006
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