• Portal
• Calendar
• A-Z Index

• Yale home
• About Yale
• Academic programs
• Admissions
• Health & medicine
• Working at Yale
• Yale & New Haven
• Yale & the World
• Giving to Yale
• News

• Prospective students
• Students
• Parents
• Faculty
• Staff
• Postdocs
• Alumni
• Foundations & corporations
• Patients
• Visitors

Find it

• About ITS
• Policies
• Feedback
• Search ITS
• ITS A-Z Index
• System Status

How to Scan for Viruses and Malware Using Symantec Antivirus

If you need further assistance, please request help from a Student Tech.

The latest versions of Symantec Antivirus (SAV) available to Yale students are 10.1.6.6000 (Windows XP) and 10.2 (Windows Vista). If you are running an older version of SAV, please follow all of these instructions to install the latest version.

These instructions assume that you have Yale's site licensed version of Symantec Antivirus (SAV) installed on your computer. If you do not, go to: http://www.yale.edu/its/stc/faq/FAQInstallSAV.html for instructions.

1. Open SAV by double-clicking on the yellow shield in the taskbar in the bottom-right of the screen. If some of your taskbar items are hidden, you may need to click on the arrow to expand the system tray to see the Symantec Antivirus icon.
2. Click on the Live Update button on the main screen of SAV.
Click Next in the LiveUpdate window, wait for it to download and install updates.
3. After LiveUpdate has finished, click Finish to continue.

4. In the left pane of the Symantec Antivirus screen, select Scan, and then Full Scan. In the right pane, click on Options.

5. In Scan Options, click on Actions.

6. Select Security Risks in the left pane and Delete threat as the Second Action:.

7. Click OK and then OK again to close the options. Click Scan to start. SAV will now scan your computer for viruses. This scan may take several hours, depending on the number of files on your computer and the speed of your computer. We recommend that you start a virus scan before you go to bed at night and leave it on to complete the scan.

8. When the scan completes, you can close the scan window and any alert windows. You can also close the SAV main program window. If no viruses were found during the scan, your computer is virus free. Please continue to keep SAV and Windows updated.
9. If any problems are found, an alert window will pop up and notify you. Please record the threat name and where the infection occurred in case you need to talk to a CA about it later. Quarantine or delete any threats that SAV finds.

10. If any viruses were found during the scan, restart your computer and scan for viruses again to verify your computer is clean. When SAV successfully removes a security threat, this second scan will not find any viruses. If you get no new threat alerts, then your computer will be clean.
11. If the second scan does finds the same problem again, then the virus has infected your computer and virus scans alone will not clean it. In this case, please request further help from a ST to get the virus completely removed from your computer.