Got bored and tried Sophos 9.5

So I thought today since I was snowed in I would try out an AV I've never really seen or knew anything about. I decided to try Sophos since I don't hear much about it, yet they have decent performance in the AVC tests. They also seem to be very proactive according to the VB-RAP results. The version mentioned in the title is an AV with HIPS, behavior detection, web protection, firewall, and some sort of cloud-based reputation service called Live Protection. Sophos seems to be geared towards the enterprise and business sectors more than for your average user. I like it so far but I was unable to get a price on it which could make this either more or less appealing. I've included some screen shots to share with everyone. The browser seems somewhat sluggish at times when opening, but overall the performance on my machine is quite acceptable. I would like to see the HIPS alerts be more informative while keeping their simplistic theme. The firewall section has more options than I'm comfortable tweaking. Has anyone here any experience with this program?

 

A few more screen shots I thought would be relevant. These are from the firewall section with application control.

 

This is the last of my screen shots. If I can find time I might try some malware links both new and old and see how Sophos does. Needless to say this won't be scientific or professional but it might give me and idea of what to expect from this product.

 

I don't think they have a version for home users, they do have a free AV for macs though.

 

Thx for taking time to post all the screenshots. My university is using Sophos. Often people tend to forget Sophos but thats proberbly because they are targeting companies. I love their interface. Classic, clean and well laied-out options.

 

I am liking it so far too. It seems very simple and understandable on most levels. For having 7 processes it is pretty light.

 

Yeah, im thinking of giving it a go too. The version i can get through Uni is the AV 9.5. I have difficulties finding out what components it contains, but installing will problerbly give the answer I dont wanna use the firewall, so if all the antimalware components like cloud features are incorporated, im happy

 

My only experience with Sophos is from using the free command line scanner from within UBCD4Win.I've found it to have good detection capabilities albeit with a lot of FPs.

 

Did you report the false positives? I'm just wondering what their support or response time is like?

 

I did report them yes (manually as I couldn't see a way to do so from the CLI).
They were fixed within a few hours,whether or not that's a typical turnaround I'm not sure.

The suite definitely looks worthy of a run out,it'll be interesting to see how the full-blown product performs.

 

Does Webroot use version 9.5 of Sophos in their home products?

 

yeah, it is typical for them to address FPs that quickly. the longest time i've experienced for them addressing an FP was appx 12 hours. new sample turn-around is usually just as quick.

 

http://www.sophos.com/products/buy-now/

Pretty expensive

 

I'm not sure what version Webroot uses...they may not use Sophos at all now that they own Prevx.

 

That's impressive response time. Sophos seems to do relatively well against threats it has no sig for also.

 

Yes that's very impressive,a lot faster than some of the big hitters.

 

Yes, Webroot oem'ed their AV engine from Sophos.

 

Some more screen shots of Sophos in action. The URL filter and Web Scanner caught all but 1 file out 25 different links on 2 different malware link databases. The 1 file missed was caught by the HIPS at execution and all communications from the file were stopped. No too bad for a few links. I like that the malicious links were stopped before they downloaded to my machine. I also submitted the missed file to them. I found it interesting also that Sophos caught the links that IE8 Smart Screen filter missed.

 

Wow, Sophos GUI looks like Win XP