HitmanPro.ALERT Support and Discussion Thread

Information and verification, right SM?

 

As I said, you're right, of course.

 

Both HitmanPro and HitmanPro.Alert currently work on Windows Vista (and XP?).

Will they keep working on these OSes going forward as Sophos takes ownership of HMP/A? The system requirements for Sophos Home don't mention either Vista or XP.

 

Thanks for this information Dan and welcome here. What a pity that Opera isn't supported as a browser with this useful-looking prog

EDIT: This new 'tool' won't even install if it sniffs that EAM (and probably similar progs) is installed on the system. So can't test it or even see what it does.

 

Even though I do not have a license on Hitman Pro or Alert... and even though I understand the decision to sell the product to a bigger company, it still leaves me with mixed feelings.

Yes, there is this Sophos 'promises' : "Sophos will continue development and support for SurfRight’s existing product line .."

Nonetheless, I am sure that joining a bigger company will have an impact on the flexibility, response-times, etc. in the long run.

No doubt, after some time, it may take a year or two, Hitman Pro will be integrated into the Sophos Enduser protection line
(why wouldn't they? After all, it would be a good sales argument for Sophos)
and even later Sophos may announce an end-of-life of the Hitman Pro line and offer a competitive price to the HMP users to switch to Sophos.

Let's see...

=

 

It would be very hard to believe anything else but that. Gladly 'side projects' are always possible.

 

Chill out some of you guys, HMP is still around, they just got bigger, well done to them. Yes, many other companies went down a similar route and their product was Borged and the product disappeared, but this time it may possibly be different. Let's give them a chance and keep using this thread for technical discussions

 

I can confirm the BSOD on bootup error on 2 seperate PCs after carrying out more checks. The Asus is Win7-64 the Dell Win7-32.

The error occurs with the the latest public version of HMP.A installed and only occurs when a Bitlocker encrypted USB drive is connected prior to bootup. This happens even with BadUSB option disabled.

The BSOD occurs just after BIOS loads and before any Windows splash screen becomes visible. The BSOD is reported as occuring with partmgr.sys and confirmed by BlueScreenView.

This Bitlocker USB drive was unencrypted overnight and this morning several re-boots were successful, no BSOD.

Therefore the BSOD only occurs with a Bitlocker encrypted drive connected during bootup. I suggest that for quite many small and medium size business, even home users (e.g. typical Secunia clients?) this can be a typical set up, and so I believe the error should be further investigated and fixed

 

From HitmanPro in the (Sitecom) router to HitmanPro in the (Sophos) UTM, is a small step for (Lo)man, but a giant step for their bank account. 29 million well done This also answers my question in this thread: the loman brothers are that smart

 

I think you're absolutely right.
The only difficulties I could think of are technical changes in the future that cause license incompatibilities, or an oversight of the situation that users have bought 'old' type licenses for use in the future, I could imagine difficulties because of that.
But there's Erik and Mark, who are definitely not stupid, and who told us that current or recently purchased licenses will be valid for use in the future. This promise must have been part of the acquisition deal. I cannot imagine otherwise.
So, like you, Peter, I suppose all will be fine. Nevertheless, I think there's little harm in mentioning certain worries, to make sure Sophos will be alert to potential license incompatibility issues in the future, or other potential issues.

 

There are both good and bad stories of acquisitions, personally I think it's too early to say how this will turn out but of course I hope for the best and fear the worst.
Besides I think it's just human to worry about something you care for when the future of that something is still uncertain (we've been told some things but that doesn't mean it'll happen that way or that some caveats weren't mentioned etc) as long as it doesn't turn into fear preaching or something. Personally I'm more worried about pricing in the future, like you say "They live on enterprise business" which could potentially mean home users could get a worse deal in a bad case scenario.. But then again it could remain the same or better in a good case scenario.
I'm also interested in the future of the products, will some features that used to be paid now be free or features that used to be free now be paid etc, how will the development be from now on as slower/same/faster, if betas will still be available, how public they can be in the future and how much they can contribute in public conversations etc as they have in the past. In other words I'm just interested in what's actually going to change rather than what's not going to change.

 

We will honor all current licenses!!! We hope you love the product and we hope you love how together SurfRight and Sophos could make it even better in the future and stay a happy customer!

 

Fully understand your concerns, but rest assured, we will honor all licenses and we will work hard to continue to earn your business only by making the solution better, not harder for you. We cherish the SurfRight customers, one of the reasons we bought the company and want to humbly earn your trust, respect and business for the long run.

 

I have been there myself with acquisitions, so I fully understand your fear and concern. Rest Assured we love the SurfRight customer base and will work hard to continue to serve you and in fact, hope over time we can make you even happier. Please keep our feet to the fire and hold us up to a high bar because we plan to meet and hopefully exceed all of your expectations for us.

 

We will honor all current and future licenses. We plan to keep the product running as is and hope and expect new licensees will come on board soon. We do plan to use their technology in our business products as well and if you want to license that, which will have additional functionality that we develop, you are welcome to license the new product too, but we won't make you, you can continue to use the product you've already licensed.

 

I fully understand the apprehension. We do have a history of acquiring companies and in the products either live on in tact, or they get enhanced over time. That is what we plan to do here. We have a history and legacy of offering high quality free tools to our customers including our most recent offering Sophos Home, which is a fully home endpoint security solution for up to 10 devices for absolutely free.

https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools.aspx

In addition we also offer free Home UTM, Mobile Security and other offerings. We plan to provide the HItmanPro product from this site to help grow the customer base. As I mentioned, we do plan to integrate their world class technology into our, already world class, commercial endpoint solution, but that integration will be an entirely new product and will not affect the current licensees at all.

 

Well this is great news for both Surfright and Sophos, and is doubtless a very wise acquisition. Warm congratulations to Erik and Mark and their team, and this is reward for all the hard work and devotion you've put into the development, marketing etc.
My only concern at present is about whether we'll be able to receive such (or similar)attentive support for the product/s from either Erik or Mark in the future, here at WSF as we're used to?

 

Business case is quite clear IMO

1. Reason for Sophos to buy Surfright = HitmanPro.UTM
   As illustrated at the website of Surfright (see link), Surfright has developed technology (IntRapid) which offers an advantage compared to traditional UTM (stream scanning) technology. Sophos main focus is the Enterprise market and it has over 200 million users, adding this technology to their UTM solution would provide Sophos with a competitive advantage.
   
   According to old data (2012) I found from market watcher Gartner, Sophos was number six in North American UTM market(the largest in the World), but with an impressive growth percentage (35%), so by acquiring Surfright, they acquire new technology ("HitmanPro.UTM" sold by Sitecom as HitmanPro in the router).
   
   
2. Reason for Sophos to buy Surfright = HitmanPro Alert
   HMPA used some innovative technique to prevent end users from ransomware and exploits (using CPU's capabilities). According to two years old data I found from market watcher IDC, Sophos ranked number four in the corporate market. Ransomware is a on the security agenda on most corporate IT-managers, so adding anti-ransomware solution to their endpoint solution would increase the attractiveness of the Sophos endpoint solution.
   
   Big players in Endpoint Security are ESET, IBM, F-Secure, Microsoft, Check Point Technologies and Kaperski. IBM bought Trusteer in 2014 to acquire safe online banking technology. Eset and Kapersky are the AV's providing anti-exploit and zero day capabilities to their endpoint solutions. So with HitmanPro Alert (a bit of mixed bag with anti-ransomware, secure transactions and anti-exploit) Sophos acquires technologies which are hyped in the corporate endpoint market today.
   
   
3. Reason for Sophos to buy Surfright = consumer market user base
   Eset and Kapersky leverage their consumer marketshare into high levels of compatibility and low system management attention levels. When consumer market share was taken into account Sophos was number 6 (instead of 4) in the endpoint market.
   
   Sophos obviously has chosen to provide free consumer products to increase the variety and variation in hardware and user setups of their installed base (so corporate users won't run into problems, because the end users in the consumer market have ironed out all the new release problems). Buying a company like Surfright with an relatively large user base, only adds another cherry on the cake.

When you look at the chamber of commerce turnover data of Surfright, an acquisition price of 9-10 million euro would be realistic. So Sophos paid nearly three times (29 million) for the technology. It would not make sense to let it die.

So I would not be afraid for discontinued products, expect an increase in strength of HMPA on ransomware and some trimming down of the aggresiveness of the anti-exploit features of HPMA. HMP will certainly be developed further and incorporated in Sophos UTM product line.


Regards Kees


Explanation.
Use the number of pages in the thread of HPMA as an indication of issues reported and problems discussed. For reference the MBAE thread only has 116 pages, but it is younger. Would we extrapolate the pages (correct MBAR thread for being younger), MBAE would have 191 pages when that thread would have started in the same month as HPMA. So HPMA still has 40% more pages. IT managers and system admins would not be happy with a product requireing so much support. So expect HPMA to trim down on anti-exploit aggresiveness to reduce issues and increase compatibility.

 

Thanks very much for all your replies so far, Dan.

 

Good question.
Was that answered in some previous post, already? I can't recall, so I'd like to know as well.

 

Hi, this is Dan Schiappa the SVP and GM from Sophos. I was responsible for driving this acquisition. I can explain further why we bought it. We do not plan to use HitmanPro.UTM, as we have one of the largest UTM and NGFW businesses in the world and growing more than 2x the market rate, so we are very excited and proud of our business there. We are very interested in their endpoint technologies both for the consumer use case, but also for integration into our commercial product. We are the 4th largest endpoint provider in the world and growing much faster than the market in that space as well. We believe by combining the next generation technologies we have, such as Behavior Analytics, Malicious Traffic Detection, Crowd Sourced Application Reputations, and Security Heartbeat, we will further advance our solution to be the unquestionable leader in the space. On the consumer side, we offer free tools today, located at: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools.aspx, and we plan to continue to offer them, and will offer HitmanPro from this location. All in all very exciting and we hope you will feel that when you look back at this acquisition, it is something that you will all be happy with.

 

Thanks for the support guys. We bought a company called Dialogs, and became our industry awarded mobile product, called Sophos Mobile Control. Because of our security background we added mobile data encryption and android security to their product. So we've invested even more into it. More recently we bought Mojave for Cloud based Web Filtering, and launched it inside Sophos Cloud. Grew and invested in that team as well. And most recently bought an email security company called Reflexion and launched their product in the Cloud as well and will also invest more in that team. We plan to do the same thing here. Keep on doing what they do well, add value to that, and hopefully grow this forum to even more happy and loyal customers. The fact that you all care so much about Erik and Mark, and their product is just a great testament to both you and the SurfRight guys. We hope we can become part of the family and I think our customer base is also a happy and loyal one, so we hope to continue to serve you for many years to come.

 

Congrats to both Sophos and everyone at SurfRight, especially Mark & Erik of course.

 

I'm of course delighted for Mark and Erik, seeing their good work rewarded.

But let me illustrate my concern. Anybody remember TheatFire? Suppose you just heard about it and want to give it a try. Click on threatfire.com.

Going forward (and for how long), will customers continue to be able to purchase new licenses for standalone HitmanPro.Alert, to run resident alongside a security suite that's not by Sophos?