Symantec Endpoint Protection Removal

bmack99
Contributor III

I've seen a ton of threads regarding removing SEP, most of which reference the script that Symantec/Broadcom provide. My issue with those is that it removes ALL Symantec products from the machine, we also run the Symantec WSS agent and the DLP agent on our machines, those need to stay.

Does anyone have a solution for removing SEP and only SEP via JAMF?

6 REPLIES 6

carlo_anselmi
Contributor III

To my knowledge, with Catalina OS, SEP cannot be automatically removed with the Symantec Removal Tool script like it used to be in pre-Catalina OS
You have to use the manual uninstall from the SEP app iteself

bmack99
Contributor III

Well that's a bummer and certainly not ideal in a large organization (man I really loathe Symantec/Broadcom).
We actually have a very small Catalina install base though, has anyone found a solution for 10.14 machines that does NOT uninstall other Symantec products?

DBrowning
Valued Contributor II

@brianmcbride99 I use the SymantecRemovalTool to remove SEP from our devices. Just need to remove the folder /Library/Application Support/Symantec before running the tool if the machine is running macOS Catalina.

If you look at the readme file downloaded from SymantecRemovalTool, see if any of the files used by WSS are touched. I needed to keep DLP installed as well. All the DLP files stay in place so it continues to work. The only "gotcha" is that it will delete the receipts com.symantec.dlp.edpa.bom and com.symantec.dlp.edpa.plist which are both needed for the DLP uninstall_agent script to work. But you can add those files back in if you are needing to uninstall DLP.

EDIT: I will also add this process worked/works for SEP 14.2.x. We never installed 14.3.

carlo_anselmi
Contributor III

@ddcdennisb Thank you , re:Catalina and SymantecRemovalTool that's good workaround to know!!!

josh_glenn
New Contributor II

@DBrowning perhaps you can provide direction on our situation. We are unable to remove DLP from our machines - both attempting the uninstaller that Symantec provides and attempting the workaround script found here on Jamf Nation. You mention adding the files back so that the uninstaller works - how did you go about doing this?

DBrowning
Valued Contributor II

@josh.glenn I went to a machine with a fresh install and copied the 2 files the uninstaller look at. put them in a package and installed them. Then you can run the uninstaller without issue. e72b23500a5a4ddab6a05369853993fc