Deal with viruses/spyware in quarantine

Note: Virus here is used to refer to any virus, worm, Trojan, or other malicious software.

On the Home page, under Anti-virus and HIPS, click Manage quarantine items.
For information about the Home page, see About the Home page.
In the Show list, click Viruses/spyware.

Information about each item is shown in the columns.

Name displays the identity that Sophos Anti-Virus has detected. To learn more about the virus/spyware, click the identity, and Sophos Anti-Virus connects you to the analysis of the virus/spyware on the Sophos website.

Details displays the name and location of the item. If the item is associated with a rootkit, it is displayed as “Hidden”. If a more link is displayed next to the filename, this means that the item is infected with a multi-component infection. Click the link to see the list of other components that are part of the infection. If any of the components are associated with a rootkit, the dialog box indicates that some components are hidden.

Available actions displays actions that you can perform on the item. Unless the item is hidden, there are three actions: Clean up, Delete, and Move, described below. If you click one of the actions, the action is performed on the item, following confirmation. Hidden files can only be cleaned up.

Dealing with the infected items

To deal with the viruses/spyware, use the buttons described below.

Select all/Deselect all

Click these buttons to select or deselect all the items. This enables you to perform the same action on a group of items. To select or deselect a particular item, select the check box to the left of the item type.

Clear from list

Click this to remove selected items from the list, if you are sure that they do not contain a virus or spyware. This does not delete the items from disk, however.

Perform action

Click this to display a list of actions that you can perform on the selected items.

Click Clean up to remove a virus or item of spyware from the selected items. Cleanup of documents does not repair any side-effects of the virus in the document.
Note: To fully clean some viruses/spyware consisting of several components from your computer, or to clean up hidden files, you will need to restart the computer. If this is the case, you will be given an option to restart your computer immediately or later. The final cleanup steps will be performed after the computer is restarted.

Note: Cleanup of some viruses causes a full system scan to be run, which tries to clean up all the viruses. This might take a long time. The available action changes to Cleaning up until the scan has finished.
Click Delete to delete the selected items from your computer. Use this function with care.
Click Move to move the selected items to another folder. The items are moved to the folder that was specified when cleanup was set up. Moving an executable file reduces the likelihood of it being run. Use this function with care.

CAUTION: Sometimes, if you delete or move an infected file, your computer may stop working properly because it cannot find the file. Also, an infected file may only be part of a multiple infection, in which case deleting or moving this particular file will not clean the infection from your computer. In this case, contact Sophos technical support to get assistance in dealing with the items.

For information about contacting technical support, see Technical support.

To configure what action you can perform, refer to Configure user rights for Quarantine manager.