0

I am having trouble with an email attachment that I received. I use an icloud email account and am accessing it from the Mail app on my iPhone. The attachment is a PDF file but when I try to open it, the file only contains this message: "Trend Micro Antivirus has quarantined the previously attached file, if this is a genuine file please contact Consortium Group to have it unblocked."

I do not have any sort of antivirus protection on my phone or on any of my devices. It would seem odd to me if the sender's antivirus would quarantine an outgoing message. So I am struggling to work out where the message was quarantined.

The attachment has also been renamed to: "TREND_MICRO_ANTIVIRUS_QUARANTINED_ATTACHMENT.TXT"

I don't really want to ask the sender to resend the email because this is rather important and I don't want to seem incompetent and cause a hassle. So that would be a last resort but I may end up with the same result...

I don't know who Consortium Group are or how to contact them. Do they actually have the pre-quarantined attachment that I am after or do they just modify their filters to allow it to be resent correctly?

Any ideas on how to retrieve the attachment? Any clue as to at what stage and why it was quarantined?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

This has nothing to do with your iPhone, or your competence. You received a txt document, in place of the original document, so the original was never sent to you, or rather, it was restricted, by a security tool, from leaving the originators network.

This is very likely a Data Loss Prevention tool (possibly from Trend Micro) that sits on the originator's network, that is preventing the emailing of this document. These tools 'sniff' the contents of an email and attachment, and if they find strings similar to things like social security numbers, membership numbers, or other sensitive corporate data, they will remove the attachment and not allow it to be sent. They also can be set more generically, like not allowing any Excel document to be sent.

You will need to contact the originator, and explain that a security tool on their network is removing the attachment. They will need to ensure that the attachment meets their company's security standards before the system will allow it to be sent.

Improve this answer
1
  • I was hoping this was the case. I find it odd though that their security flagged this, it should be a pretty standard contract that they send to a large(ish) number of people so I don't know why mine would be flagged. Perhaps this is a common occurrence for them and they haven't bothered to fix it. I asked them to resend it to my gmail account. The attachment came through fine. Im not sure if they modified anything in the document or not. Perhaps just using a different mail server than iCloud made it work...
    – sion
    Apr 23, 2015 at 8:45

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .