Hi all, a quick question. My university offers Sophos home premium for free. I usually don't do lots of risky stuff. Is it worth it to set it up? Does it have any side effects on my computer like slowing it down?

Thanks.

Hi all, I was wondering if sophos is a good AV in 2022, I remember it was pretty good in 2020 and they've also moved to cloud so there should be minimal impact to pc resources.

I heard that accounts that were modified to be sophos home free before the "change" would still be able to use sophos free but newer accounts wont be able to. Also, what led to this sudden unusual decision by sophos?

how does it compare to premium, how does it compare to KSCF?

https://home.sophos.com/en-us/free-anti-virus-windows?

I am considering getting Sophos Home antivirus, but I'm really not a fan of "everything about you and your software is stored in the Cloud^TM" paradigm that every company and their mother is trying to push.

Is Sophos Home a "good" AV, and is it safe (in the sense that it doesn't sell/steal your data)?

So it appears that the non-premium version of Sophos Home has been silently moved from "Free Edition" to "Free Trial". The dashboard is no longer functional and after updating the software it appears essentially bricked with nothing but an ad for premium.

Feels like the beginning of the end for Sophos. I understand sometimes a company will discontinue a product, but to pull the rug out from under me is unhelpful to say the least, especially on a security focused product.

I am very disappointed. I had previously considered upgrading to premium, but I do not consider Sophos an option anymore. I do not feel comfortable trusting my security to a company who will brick my AV with no advance warning.

No blog post or announcement in sight - in fact most of the website still says "Free" but the landing pages have been changed to "Free Trial".

Wondering if others are running into the same issues. Discussion is welcome.

Edit: Thanks u/zw9491! Looks like it has been officially mentioned in at least one location so at least we don't have to speculate.

It also confirms

No, your computer is not protected after the license expires. None of the Sophos Home settings/protections will work until the license is renewed.

Wondering if, after four years of trouble-free Mac use I should bend and finally install an antivirus.

I am tech savvy and used to work at Apple. Therefore I am not afraid of biting to e-mail scams, but still I use BitTorrent software and browse around a lot.

Sophos antivirus claims it is lightweight. That is my major concern : how actually light is it ?

I have been trying to find an alternative to Sophos Home - Sophos Home is great but I don’t like that everything is managed through the website. This becomes a pain when someone else wants to make a change on their PC but they’re prompted to sign into my account.

Is there any other 10 device plans that compare with Sophos in price? They only charge like 30-50 a year for 10 devices - and they don’t hike the price after the 1st year.

I was pitched this appliance and all the associated junk software that came with it as a "anti-virus Cloud network powered by machine learning" but I have seen literally nothing redeeming about any of their products so far.

1. Their SSLVPN client is just OpenVPN re-badged with their icon. Literally.

2. Their endpoint clients need the local computer to be restarted at least a half a dozen times per week.

3. I have seen about 50% of my endpoint clients crap-the-bed for one reason or another and they usually require hacky workarounds, manual registry fixes, and way too much log surfing to fix.

4. There's probably about a 25% chance that intalling/upgrading a client will fail for some arbitrary reason.

5. They have no update release schedule. Whenever some product is ready for release it gets released by whoever, whenever, even if they've already made you restart half your infra once that day.

6. They don't deal directly with customers. You have to have a "partner." If you want to stop doing business with a "partner" and pick a different one they have no real way of handling that other than some sales guy going on Google and looking up another one for you.

7. The UI is terrible, unintuitive, and I find inconsistencies between the actual interface and the documented interface all the time.

8. The endpoing clients are terrible. There is so little functionality I almost wonder if it does anything at all.

9. They usually break something over here whenever they fix something over there.

10. They have a hidden "feature" called the "Sophos Competitor Removal Tool" which silently removes software from your network.

11. HOW MANY DIFFERENT F*****G LOG FILES YOU DO NEED TO THROW AROUND MY FILESYSTEMS?!?!?

12. Their subscriptions barely protect anything unless you pay for all their upselling.

13. They didn't stop a spear phishing ransomware attack in my organization. My own scripts stopped it instead.

14. UTM, SEP, CID, CES, CEA, CRT, SAU, SAV, SAVi, SAVDi, SMCaaS..... Screw off you pretentious prick. You are not important enough to have that many acronyms. My cognitive load is high enough already.

15. They literally use malicious exfiltration techniques (DNS tunnelling) during normal operation (try detecting TXT record exfiltration in your domain and Sophos will be the worst offender).

16. About 75% of the remote operations I try to perform from Sophos Central simply don't work.

17. This shit costs THOUSANDS of dollars!?!?!?!

Sorry for the long rant. I had to get that out there. I think once our contract is up I'm gonna throw this piece of junk on Craigslist and start over.

I might be infected i try to find help in techsupport and people say anti viruses / anti malware 100% dosent detect all type of malware they say to reinstall windows any help if this is true and is sophos home good? Aswell kaspersky virus removal tool?

Have been using Sophos Home since it was launched as a Beta and have subscribed to the Premium since it became chargeable - It expired this week (just found out after launching Sophos to see when the defs were from). I didn't get a reminder like usual but anyway, before I hit renew I am wondering if there are better alternatives out there now? I protect 8 Windows devices, a few being family, so want to make sure it's worth switching before telling them to install / have to do an install for them.

I don't do anything fancy with it, so have all features enabled as per the recommended settings.

Hi there,

I realize that this is the Sophos Reddit, but I can't think of a better place to ask this question. I am the new IT Manager for a company that has neglected all things IT for the last 4 years. I have put out most of the major fires and now I'm looking at all my endpoints. I have about 60 PC and a couple of servers with little to no protection. I'm working with CDW to get something figured out. Their #1 choice was Sophos and after the dog and pony show, I agree, it looks amazing. Then I got the price tag and my jaw dropped. Even with deep discounting, it was nearly double what I expected (I figured $9k the quote was $16k). I have no issue going back to my leadership and telling them, but I've left wondering, is it worth it? Could anyone share their experiences that wouldn't mind being used as a reference of sorts? I'm not going to call anyone or ask people to talk with my leadership. I just want to make sure that I'm doing the right thing.

Thank you!

Tom

Hey guys!

Did a test on Sophos Home with 15 recent malicious scripts consisting of .bat, .js and .vbs files. The samples were collected from https://app.any.run by using the filter type scripts and malicious verdicts. All samples are very recent, almost all of them were uploaded today. Some of the samples there are AsyncRAT, AutoIt infostealer, RAT abusing NetSupport's legitimate remote control software, droppers, downloaders and fileless loader for XWorm.

Malicious scripts were saved in a folder and Sophos Home was then installed. The settings were all kept enabled and it was checked to see if all the protections were enabled. The folder was then scanned, and the remaining samples were ran by double clicking.

Test was done on a Windows 10 Hyper-V machine with fully disabled Windows Defender and internet connection. Software such as Process Monitor, Process Explorer, Autoruns, TCPView were installed to monitor malware behavior and determine the detection, persistency or malicious activity.

Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbCeP9GEhJY

Samples: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/472c9765f8cdd92a36e0301c2ad2d38f775002dc49db1ea439a6cb86c285d7d6/relations (if anyone retrieves the archive, the password is infected)

• Static detection (detection when scanning the folder containing all malware): 1/15 (6,6%)

• Remediated samples after running (samples that were terminated and their malicious activity did not pursue) 10/14 (71%)

• Samples, that were able to set a persistency (run after restarting): 4/14 (28%)

• Samples, that were terminated after triggering persistency when restarting (by behavioral engine): 2/4 (50%)

• Samples, that were able to run after triggering persistency, however did not show direct malicious behavior: 1/4 (25%)

• Samples, that were able to run and showed direct malicious behavior, such as connecting to C2, downloading more malware: 1/4 (25%)

• Malware that was able to get away with malicious activity: 1/15 (6,6%)

Final verdict: This test once again proved that the most important part of anti-malware software is the behavioral detection. Second opinion scanners can not do what Sophos did here today. The ability to remediate malware detected by behavioral detection is very good here, but can definitely be improved. Sophos is a great anti-virus software,

Improvements: Finding the actual culprit triggering the detections is my only idea here if we don't consider the poor static detection, since the samples were new. It is not comfortable restarting into 5 popups about blocking PowerShell that blocks my whole screen. I would also love the ability to close all the notifications at once in the tray.

Sophos is definitely on the right track to become a top product. Considering these samples are very new and are not statically detected yet, the fact behavioral detection was able to handle this well is impressive.

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Please, use a real antivirus software. Do not rely on VirusTotal analysis and then using second opinion scanners time to time. You need a behavioral detection nowadays. Script malware is everywhere and statically detecting it is just not as effective as flagging it's malicious behavior. If you look at the static detections from VirusTotal, the chances your antivirus would detect are low, as most popular engines struggle with flagging it. Making a statically undetected script is not as hard as it may look.

i'm looking for a free AV for my mobile device. from the comments i saw in previous posts, they would mostly recommend sophos (intercept x) and bitdefender. which between these two would you recommend more? thanks in advance!