Why do the same 4 threats keep reoccurring?

Standbylight

Hello everyone,

Sorry if I'm being a bit slow, I'm a noob with anti virus software (never used any before). I'm currently testing out the trial version of Antivirus For Mac and during the recommended initial system scan, 6 threats were detected. One of them BD dealt with as expected (remnants of an application), and moved it into quarantine. Another file in the same folder, also leftovers from the same application, couldn't be quarantined (Why, though?), so I manually sought it out and got rid of it (and hope I'm in the clear now?).

But the other 4 threats are behaving strangely:

1. They aren't actually 4 files but just 2 separate files that are somehow counted twice. I checked the file path to make sure.
2. Bitdefender claims to have "deleted" one and "disinfected" the other (whatever that is supposed to mean). I therefore assumed the issue was dealt with, but during the next system scan (restarted the computer in between), all four threats were found again, with Bitdefender again marking them as "deleted" and "disinfected". Both files are in /Users/myname/Library/Mail/..., one being a .docx attachment and the other being an email from ages ago, if this is important.

What am I doing wrong? Why are the exact same files listed twice? If the software isn't supposed to deal with the files by itself, why is it telling me otherwise? I am extremely reluctant to go through any library files and delete stuff.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Luck

Maybe a bug, or a glitch. Happened to me before (4 weeks later)

mgrube

I would say this is probably not a glitch and more that this could be a case where only part of the malware is being detected. It may be continuing to run but only part of it is detected so you keep seeing the alerts again. I'm not sure if BitDefender has a MacOS equivalent for BDSyslog on MacOS but that's what I would run here and then send the results to BitDefender for analysis. For what it's worth, disinfected means that BitDefender removed only the malicious portions of whatever file it disinfects.