Sophos Home Updated. Need Your Feedback!

Where is Alex with news of this new version, changelog ?

 

How good is this AV, I don't find any test in the web.

 

What happened to the mentioned features 4 months ago? Alex_Sophos, where are you?

 

We're making that change in the UI and it'll be in place by the end of this month. Something our engineers also noticed. Thanks for pointing it out!

 

For the free version, some good reviews to look at would be Tom's Guide, AV-Comparatives www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/avc_mac_2016_en.pdf, AV-Test, and PC Mag. They've all reviewed either the PC or Mac side of Sophos Home.

No official Sophos Home Premium reviews since it still is in beta.

 

Still a hot topic for the past while. First priority is reducing false positives to 0 or as close to 0 as humanly possible. Through different technological advances, we're pushing to make false positives are as rare as a camel in Antartica (I'm sure someone will now find a picture of that happening). That said, false positives still happen occasionally and the typical answer is quarantine features. So that's something we've been toying with and something you might see in a future beta. No hard dates though. But I've been keeping the engineers up-to-speed on how everyone on this thread feels about it. And it's overwhelmingly for quarantine! So we're balancing the want for quarantine with the other features we're improving and/or adding to the beta.

 

It's been lots of tweaks to the backend of the regular/free and premium beta versions of Sophos Home. Mostly to improve detection rates and decrease false positives. There have been some other changes coming to both versions of Sophos Home, but I'm not at liberty to announce them all yet. I'll ask the engineering team about providing a change log for Wilders.

 

Just another thought here, but if you guys keep ignoring a quarantine, while chasing a unicorn of 0% false positives, you may lose the support of the technical community. The value of word of mouth support, once viral, is much more impressive than what any paid marketing team could achieve.

 

@Tinstaafl you're exactly right. We do want the technical community to fall in love with Sophos Home because your approval and word-of-mouth support is worth more than all the dollars we could throw at marketing programs and the like. That's why I've been involved with Wilders, to get your feedback and engage with you all. What I don't want you to believe, is that I'm on here to give fluffy, marketing phrases in order to 'mask' over the lack of quarantine, to convince you that the product doesn't need it, and just like us regardless.

We have been taking quarantine much more serious this past month, using Wilders as one of our strong arguments for it. With all the Sophos tech at our disposal, quarantine has been lost when enhancing the product. But honestly, we've been pushing very hard this month to get quarantine in a beta phase for you all to test and give feedback on—I just don't have any solid dates yet. Thanks for your patience in this. I know it's kind of frustrating to keep saying the same thing for months. We are taking this feedback quite serious.

 

Honestly I just do not understand why the Sophos tech team is having a hard time understanding the concept. Is it they have only experienced enterprise security which embraces taking all decisions away from the end user?

I worked for years in an enterprise environment, where it took an act of congress just to get admin rights to my laptop. And all of the endpoint security was remotely managed. I get the need for that. But for home and small office users without a managed network, there is a critical need for some control.

 

I really don't understand why it's so difficult to implement a simple quarantine function. However, I won't install Sophos AV with autodelete.

 

Exactly!

Case in point, I was trying to download and install a product recently when my Avira intercepted the installer upon execution, and quarantined it. Something about a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Program) detection.

So then I went into the Avira quarantine, restored the file, and set it to "ignore".

I re-scanned it with several other tools, and the only thing I could determine was that the file was on several PUP lists.

So when I ran the installer again, no new threats appeared, nothing else was installed, and all is good. False alarm!

Quarantine is indispensable!!!

 

well my first question is is the home premium beta test is that for sophos home or sophos premium i know thyis is for home here but what about the betas test program sophos has going on? i cant seem to find where the sophos premium installer is.

 

Hi Folks,

I signed up to Sophos Home Beta but, after a couple of months, decided not to pursue it any further. Why? I was very frustrated with the lack of timely feedback to users' questions and issues. It's a real shame because the product had some excellent features. But when someone asks a question, Sophos staff are sometimes the only people who can answer that question. When Sophos Home Premium is finally released, I'll consider purchasing it. In the meantime, I'm evaluating the alternatives.

JPC

 

Running v.1.2.3 of the Premuim beta on my main Windows 10 HDD
very smooth and am loving the HMPA & HMP components.
Looking forward to maybe Scheduled scans and a "right click" quarantine now option.

 

After signing up and logging into the Dashboard I can find absolutely no link or any other way to download this software. No confirmation email ever received from Sophos either. Not happy at all with Sophos.

 

Try this, but be logged in to Sophos Cpanel before you click
the link: https://home.sophos.com/install/
If your signed in to the Sophos Cpanel it should complete that DL link.
If you don't have a Sophos acct. that link will prove useless though.
If that doesn't help, let me know I will use SS to walk you through it.

 

Didn't work. After logging in and clicking that link this is what I get.

 

Contact Sophos with these Screen Shots, sounds like something is resetting your connections on the Sophos site maybe ?
Do you have a script blocker ? if so make sure your allowing Sophos / Cloudflare, ect.
I use one and its (NoScript) in FF and all i have to allow for it to work is the "sophos.com"
good luck

 

I just clicked on 'add device' and was able to download the install file.

 

Will we get quarantine feature for Christmas? I mean Christmas 2017 ...

 

Well it's almost October, so I am beginning to wonder!

 

@Tinstaafl, @fmon we've been having some interesting conversations with the engineers in regards to quarantine. We have a few different options we are toying with, one of which comes out as part of a B2B product release next year. We have the ability to enable/disable automatic cleanup, but this quarantine feature would be much safer and better for general audiences. Don't have any more information than that, but wanted to keep you updated since you've been advocates for the feature (your replies have been shown to Sophos executives to argue the need for quarantine in B2C products).

@IvoShoen, as I understand it, you were able to download the local agent to your computer? Or are you still having issues? @_CyberGhosT_ thanks for your help with that.

@majorpain, if you download Sophos Home to a Windows PC, and then you go login into the cloud dashboard at home.sophos.com you should see a light blue bar in your dashboard asking if you would like to join the beta. After accepting, the local agent(s) on your PC(s) will upgrade to the beta and you can access the premium beta features.

@jaypeecee thanks for that feedback. The community support pages do have some drawbacks, especially when it comes to timely feedback. However, that will be remedied before premium launches because you can't be selling a premium product without excellent support. We've been working on this for some time and expect to see improvements at the end of this year.

 

@Tinstaafl @fmon, I should mention that for all PUAs, there is a "keep or clean" option already in Sophos Home. What I said a few minutes ago was in regards to a malware quarantine.

@_CyberGhosT_ glad you're liking the beta and thanks for the feedback. In regards to scheduled scans, this isn't a feature we're planning to enable. We definitely recommend that everyone runs a scan upon install to catch what's already infecting and clean up any remnants of previous infections. But as long as the various antivirus, real time, PUA, etc. protections are enabled (wouldn't recommend ever turning these off), files, and programs are automatically scanned/analyzed upon use. Malicious code will be found via its signature or behavior, and then the clean will start and being removing the offending malware. In theory, you shouldn't have to run a scan again as long as the protections are left on. That said, you might want to run additional scans for peace of mind or to remove tracking codes on a regular basis (which I like to do).

It should also be mentioned that Sophos Home (free and beta) has been updated with Malicious Traffic Detection (MTD) and Download Reputation. In a nutshell, MTD looks for traffic between a program or file on your computer and a command-and-control server. If a malicious traffic connection is found, Sophos Home will take action against the program/file. Download Reputation checks the file you're downloading against a vast database of downloadable files, letting you know if said file has a history of being malicious or full of malware, adware, etc., allowing the user to avoid the download.

 

Well thanks for the feedback, things just keep getting better and better with this software.
By all means, please keep up the stellar work