About cleanup - Sophos Endpoint Security and Control Documentation

Cleanup eliminates threats on your computer by doing one of the following:

Removing the virus/spyware from floppy disk boot sectors, documents, programs, and anything else that is selected for scanning
Moving or deleting the suspicious file
Deleting the item of adware or PUA

When Sophos Anti-Virus automatically cleans up items that contain virus/spyware, it will delete any items that are purely malware and will try to disinfect any items that have been infected. These disinfected files should be considered permanently damaged, as the virus scanner cannot know what the file contained before it was damaged.

Cleaning up documents

Cleaning up documents does not repair any side-effects of the virus/spyware in the document. See Get cleanup information to find out how to view details on the Sophos website of the virus/spyware’s side-effects.

Cleaning up programs

Cleaning up programs should be used only as a temporary measure. You should subsequently replace cleaned programs from the original disks or a clean backup.

Cleaning up web page threats

Cleanup is not required for threats that are detected by web page scanning, because the threats are not downloaded to your computer.

Note: Cleaning up a threat might not be able to undo all the actions the threat has taken on this computer. For example, if the threat changed the value of a setting, the cleanup process might not know the original setting. You might have to verify the computer's configuration. Cleaning up an infected document does not repair any changes the threat has made to the document.