Tag: antivirus

Categories
blog howto windows

Uninstall Sophos Antivirus tamper protection lost password

How to uninstall Sophos Antivirus when the Tamper Protection doesn’t let you, and you don’t know the Tamper password.

  1. Stop the Sophos Anti-Virus service if possible. Open services.msc and stop the service.
  2. Open notepad with UAC elevation, run as Administrator.
  3. In notepad open the file “C:\ProgramData\Sophos\Sophos Anti-Virus\Config\machine.xml”
  4. Find the configuration section for TamperProtectionManagement

    <TamperProtectionManagement>
    <settings>
    <password>123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ</password><enabled>true</enabled>
    </settings>
    </TamperProtectionManagement>

  5. Change the password string (123456789ABCD… above is just an example, yours will be different.) to the new value: E8F97FBA9104D1EA5047948E6DFB67FACD9F5B73
  6. Start Sophos Antivirus or restart the computer.
  7. Disable tamper protection using the new password: “password” (without the quotes).
  8. Uninstall Sophos Antivirus.