MAMP Pro 4 and Sophos Warning about Adminer Database Manager

Question

I have been using Sophos Anti-Virus on the Mac for several years now with good results. Recently when attempting to download the new MAMP Pro 4.x, I received a Sophos alert that the MAMP installer contains the Adminer Database Manager, which it identifies as known Adware and PUA.

Has anyone experienced a similar warning, and is there any reason for concern about this warning?

The only real information I can find about Adminer is this:

http://philipdowner.com/2012/01/using-adminer-with-mamp-on-mac-os-x/

This post indicates that Adminer is some type of script designed to be an alternative to PHPMyAdmin.

Can I just remove Adminer after installing?

-- Lee

Answer 1

I got the same warning and also Google Chrome flags the MAMP 4 PKG file as having a virus. It appears that the official download of Adminer throws the same warning by Sophos (from their website):

https://www.adminer.org/

So, this issue is NOT related to MAMP itself but rather the Adminer application. I think it's a false positive since from what I've seen Sophos is the only antivirus software that flags adminer.php, however you CAN remove the file Applications/MAMP/bin/adminer.php without affecting functionality of MAMP, since as you point out it is just a phpMyAdmin alternative. I simply deleted it for now.

That said, if you upgrade MAMP the file will likely be replaced.