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Sophos Free A-V For Mac May Kill Time Machine Backups

Posted by timothy on from the mysteriouser-enough-already dept.

kdawson writes "Herewith the tale of the instantaneous loss of 19 months of Time Machine backup data, with the possible involvement of a fresh install of Sophos's new free Mac A-V package. Sophos support has been contacted but has not responded as of this writing."

1 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. How does Sophos do this? by MarchHare · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He tried to open a quarantined file, once with the 'cat' command
    and once with vi, as root, and both times Sophos warned him and
    prevented him from proceeding. Now, the code for the 'cat'
    command is quite simple, it basically just does a open(2)
    of the file and then issues a series of read(2). My question
    is: Does Sophos actually intercept the system calls in order
    to make sure no application opens an infected file? If so,
    wouldn't that introduce a HUGE performance penalty on the
    everything happening on the machine, since these system calls
    are so crucial?