9.2. Personal Equipment - Antivirus and Malware

Math IT Support → Computers and Laptops → Personal Equipment - Antivirus and Malware

Installing Sophos Anti-Virus:

1. Go to https://softwarelicense.arizona.edu/sophos-central and follow the Home Use instructions.  You will be asked for your UANetID and password.
2. Select Sophos Home Free and Download Now and follow the instructions.

Removing Malware

Malware, short for malicious software, is any software program designed to cause harm to a computer system or designed to frustrate the user experience. In addition to viruses and trojan horses, this category of software includes spyware and adware. In short, malware constistutes all the software that evil people try to sneak onto your computer, but which you do not want to have on your computer. This page describes the three programs you should run to eliminate malware from a Windows system. (For more information on malware, see the Malware Wikipedia entry.)

Run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

This program, which has a free version, does a good job of removing malware. Please download malwarebytes, and then install/run the software.

Run Sophos Anti-Virus

See instructions above.

Run Lavasoft Ad-Aware

1. Download Lavasoft Ad-Aware.
2. Install/run the software and initiate a full scan of your system.
3. On the screen in which you are presented with a list of suspicious objects, you must manually select all the ones you wish to have removed. Unless a suspicious object leaps out at you as being something important, chances are that you want to remove all the suspicious objects that were found. To quickly select all objects, right-click one of the checkboxes and select the appropriate choice from the menu
4. that will pop up. Click onNext to continue to the next screen and remove the objects. 
5. When the confirmation dialog appears, click on OK.