Trusted by 200 million users and endorsed by industry analysts as a leader, Sophos provides a full range of endpoint, encryption, email, web, mobile and network security solutions that are simple to deploy, manage and use. Sophos also promotes home security by providing free tools and products, such as Sophos Home, for personal, non-business use.
Sophos Home is an affordable antivirus that prioritizes value over protection. Our hands-on testing produced poor results and, while labs disagree, Sophos hasn’t participated in a study in over. Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition. Give your home network a much needed security boost. The Home Edition of the Sophos XG Firewall features full protection for your home network, including anti-malware, web security and URL filtering, application control, IPS, traffic shaping, VPN, reporting and monitoring, and much more.
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- Web sitehttp://www.sophos.com/en-us
- Support web sitehttps://www.sophos.com/en-us/support
- Support e-mail Not provided
- Support phone Not provided
- Rescue your computer from viruses and malware.WindowsVersion 3.8.15. ...Added: 08/20/19869,56095
- Rescue your computer from viruses and malware.WindowsVersion 3.8.15. ...Added: 08/20/192,054,59317
- Eliminates malware, program exploits, and ransomware with deep scan and advanced behavior analysis.7,8578
- Protect up to 10 computers from malware and malicious software and websites.MacVersion 1.1.3 ...Added: 04/13/16268,1285
- Protect your Android device and your privacy without impacting performance or battery life.AndroidVersion 8.6.286 ...Added: 11/15/182,8864
- Sophos Authenticator is a simple and intuitive application that provides multi-factor authentication on your mobile device. It generates both...604
- Utilize business-grade cybersecurity, now available for home users.6,3083
- Sophos Network Agent allows a local network user to authenticate himself/herself to the Sophos Firewall (Project Copernicus) with an iOS device....262
- IMPORTANT INFORMATION...00
- Sophos Mobile Control is a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) agent which allows companies to easily manage, control and secure Android, iOS...00
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$60.00
- ProsGood scores in our hands-on tests. Protects against ransomware, keyloggers, and exploits. Remote management for up to 10 PCs or Macs. Inexpensive.
- ConsNo test results from independent labs. Advanced features require uncommon tech expertise. Parental control and webcam protection limited.
- Bottom LineSophos Home Premium expands on basic antivirus with protection technology forged in the company's Enterprise-level products, but doesn't have lab results to verify its efficacy.
Most companies that offer antivirus protection at the consumer level also sell endpoint protection for business entities. Some ramp up protection they've created for the consumers to make it enterprise-ready, while others cherry-pick features from their top-tier products and give them a consumer-friendly face. Sophos Home Premium gets its protective power from the company's business-level tools, and it carries over the remote management that's common for businesses. If you have the technical skills, you can install its protection for your friends or family and take care of security remotely.
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Sophos offers a free edition, which omits the most advanced features and lets you protect three computers, but even the premium edition isn't expensive. For $60 per year, you can install the product on up to 10 PCs or Macs. That's just $6 per year per device. With Bitdefender, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, Webroot, and others, you pay $39.99 per year for just one license. McAfee looks more expensive, at $59.99 per year, but that price gets you unlimited installations on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household.
Online Dashboard
As with the free edition, Sophos just installs as a small, local client on your PC. All configuration and logging activities take place in the online dashboard. That makes a lot of sense, given this product's business origins. IT departments don't leave antivirus management to untrained employees; they take care of it from a central console. If you're the go-to tech support person for your whole family or circle of friends, consider installing Sophos for the whole gang and managing it remotely. It's easier than driving across town to sort out the mess they've made.
To install Sophos on a new device, just log into the dashboard and click Add Device. You can click to download and install on the current system, or snag a link that you can send to someone else. When the recipient clicks the link, it both installs Sophos and connects the installation to your management account.
The main screen of your dashboard displays all the devices you've protected, each with a number representing outstanding notifications. Click any device for more details and configuration options. Initially, it opens to the device's Status page, subdivided into panels for Antivirus Protection, Web Protection, Ransomware Protection, Privacy Protection, and Malicious Traffic Detection. The free edition also displays these five panels, but only the first two are active.
Features Shared With Free Edition
When you pay for the Premium edition, you get everything found in Sophos Home Free and more. Read my review of the free product for a full rundown on those shared features.
Lab Test Results Chart
Malware Protection Results Chart
Phishing Protection Results Chart
Malware Protection Results Chart
Phishing Protection Results Chart
When reviewing antivirus utilities, I always look to the reports regularly issued by four independent testing labs, AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, SE Labs, and MRG-Effitas. Alas, Sophos no longer participates in testing by any of these four. Norton, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky, by contrast, participate with all four labs. Kaspersky's aggregate lab score, 9.6 of 10 possible points, is a bit lower than its usual near-perfect score, due to a couple minor stumbles, but still very good.
Only three of the four labs have included Bitdefender lately; it didn't show up in the latest report from SE Labs. However, based on the scores that are available, Bitdefender managed a perfect 10 points for aggregate lab score.
With no help from the labs, my own hands-on malware protection test results are all I have to go on. Sophos did well in my basic test using static samples, detecting 97 percent and scoring 9.3 of 10 possible points. G Data scored 9.5, and Webroot tops the list with a perfect 10, but only those two did better than Sophos.
To test how well each antivirus defends against the very newest prevalent malware attacks, I use a list of malware-hosting URLs discovered in the last few days by researchers at MRG-Effitas. Out of 100 such URLs, Sophos protected against 97 percent, in most cases by preventing the browser from ever reaching the URL. Its download reputation analysis detected several of the malware payloads whose URL wasn't blocked.
That 97 percent score is good, but others have done even better. Bitdefender, Norton, and Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security all accomplished 99 percent protection in their respective tests.
I tested protection against phishing (fraudulent) websites on Sophos Home for Windows and macOS simultaneously. The Windows edition detected 91 percent of the frauds, quite a bit better than the 82 percent detection for the Mac edition. That 91 percent score is good, but eight competing products managed 97 percent or better. Kaspersky and McAfee AntiVirus Plus pulled off 100 percent protection, and McAfee extended that 100 percent protection to its macOS edition.
Parents can configure Sophos to block access to websites matching any of 28 content categories, but you shouldn't rely on it for parental control. The content filter only supports Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera, so your teen (who knows more about tech than you do) need only install a less common browser such as Vivaldi. In addition, if you choose the option to warn about bad sites rather than actively block them, Sophos doesn't handle HTTPS sites, meaning that a smart teen could simply visit HTTPS porn sites or foil the whole system by using a secure anonymizing proxy.
As soon as the installation finishes, Sophos Home Premium immediately launches a full scan. I approve; I always advise running a full scan after installing antivirus, to make sure you've rooted out any lurking malware. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the scan finished in 22 minutes, a full hour less time than the free edition required. It found and removed the same samples that the free edition did, and also eliminated a group of tracking cookies, which are used by advertisers to track you online activity across different websites.
Exploit Protection
Some malware coders spend their days analyzing and reverse-engineering operating systems and popular applications, looking for coding errors that leave security holes. As soon as they exploit those holes, the designers of the victim app or OS get busy patching, but until the patch comes out, some systems are vulnerable. Sophos aims to block these exploits directly, with special protection for common victim apps.
On the Exploits tab you find four panels: Exploit Mitigation, Protected Applications, Risk Reduction, and Preferences. The only preference you control in that last panel is whether Sophos offers a visual indication when it extends protection to an app.
Exploit Mitigation and Risk Reduction are turned on by default, with the option to dig in for advanced settings. Those advanced settings involve things like which apps Sophos should protect, and what kind of sneaky maneuvers it should block. Just leave those settings alone; they come configured for maximum protection. Well, almost. I'd suggest opening Risk Reduction and enabling the option to stop malicious thumb drives. Doing so prevents a weird sort of attack where a specially prepared thumb drive identifies itself as a keyboard and takes control of your PC.
Sophos does its exploit protection work in the background, so you may never see it in action unless you turn on Preferences. Doing so adds a glowing border to each protected app, along with indicators along the bottom that reflect the status of Exploit Mitigation, Keystroke Encryption, and Safe Browsing. The border and indicators fade out after a short while, to avoid cluttering your screen.
![Sophos Home Download Sophos Home Download](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125628259/752054714.jpg)
As noted, Exploit Mitigation aims to block attacks on security holes in protected applications. However, it doesn't peek at incoming network traffic to detect exploits as they arrive, the way the way Symantec Norton AntiVirus Basic does. To see this feature in action, I ran my standard exploit test.
This test uses 30-odd exploits generated by the CORE Impact penetration testing tool and aimed at Windows itself and at popular apps. Sophos blocked 34 percent of the malicious payloads, reporting Malicious Content Detected. In a few cases it flagged the attack using its official name. The test system is fully patched, so even the 66 percent of exploits missed couldn't do any harm. Note that Norton caught 85 percent of the attacks, and Kaspersky Internet Security managed 81 percent (Kaspersky, like most security companies, reserves exploit protection for suite products.)
The tools managed on the Exploits page are among the most complex in this product. Fortunately, you don't have to understand them in order to benefit. Just leave them alone to do their work.
Powerful Ransomware Protection
Another feature that Sophos doesn't offer for free is ransomware protection. In theory, the regular malware scan and real-time antivirus protection should prevent ransomware attacks, just as they prevent other malware infestations. However, the consequences of missing a brand-new ransomware sample are more significant and permanent than for other types of malware. Even if your antivirus gets an update that wipes out the ransomware tomorrow, your files are still inaccessible.
The post-installation scan eliminated out all my ransomware samples, as expected. To simulate attacks by ransomware that evades usual protection, I turned off the real-time component and put my folder of ransomware samples back in place. After double-checking the status of ransomware protection, I started releasing real-world ransomware attacks on the virtual machine test system.
Out of a half-dozen ransomware samples, Sophos missed just one. That one ran to completion, encrypted my files, and displayed its ransom message. To be fair, the same thing has happened with several dedicated ransomware protection tools in testing. Check Point ZoneAlarm Anti-Ransomware, our Editors' Choice for ransomware-specific protection, got them all, and Cybereason RansomFree, also an Editors' Choice, caught every file-encrypting sample.
Malwarebytes and Cybereason RansomFree are among the handful of products I've tested that displayed a window of vulnerability during the boot process. Ransomware launched at boot time managed to do its dirty deeds before the ransomware protection system kicked in. I tested Sophos by configuring a real-world ransomware sample to launch at startup. It had no trouble preventing the attack.
In previous tests, I found one sample that encrypted a few files before Sophos could detect and block its behavior; that didn't happen this time around. It's worth noting that Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus avoids the lost file problem in an unusual way. It journals all activity by programs it can't identify as good or bad, and shares behavior information with its cloud-based analysis system. If the cloud says thumbs down, Webroot kills the program and reverses all its actions, including file encryption actions. Webroot does warn that a massive encryption attack could overrun the capacity of the journaling system.
The RanSim ransomware simulator from KnowBe4 simulates 10 different ransomware attack techniques, along with two legitimate encryption activities. Ransomware protection tools should block the 10 attacks but leave the two legitimate modules alone. Some behavior-based ransomware protection tools ignore the simulations, because they are not truly ransomware, so I don't penalize a product for a poor score in this test. But I can applaud a good score, like that achieved by Sophos. It prevented nine of the 10 simulated attacks, though it did also disable one of the legitimate code modules.
My testing aims to simulate a situation where the real-time protection system has missed a zero-day ransomware attack. Confronted with prevalent real-world ransomware samples, and with real-time protection active, Sophos wiped them all out. Based on my testing, it's also likely to handle those pesky zero-days.
Keystroke Encryption and Safe Banking
The Free and Premium editions both offer Web Protection, to keep browsers and other programs away from dangerous URLs, and Download Reputation analysis, to fend off downloads that aren't known malware but have a bad reputation. The Premium edition adds Safe Online Banking, which consists of Safe Browsing and Keylogger Protection.
Kaspersky, Bitdefender, and several others offer browser protection designed to isolate your financial transactions from other processes, thereby preventing data theft. With Sophos, Safe Browsing simply warns if your browser has been compromised. I assume it works; I don't have a way to compromise a browser for testing.
Keylogger Protection, on the other hand, is easy to test. I turned off other protection components, to keep Sophos from wiping out a free keylogger that I installed. I verified that the keylogger captured my keystrokes in Notepad, which isn't protected by Safe Browsing. When I typed in a browser instead, the keylogger caught only gibberish. When I tested the similar feature in G Data Antivirus, the keylogger received nothing at all from the browser. Note that G Data includes a separate component called BankGuard, which isolates the browser against other kinds of>
Bitdefender, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, and ESET don't get in the way of legitimate applications that need to use the webcam. However, when an unknown program tries to peek at you, they put its access on hold and notify you. If it's some new video-conferencing tool you just installed, you can mark it as trusted. If not, just block its access.
Webcam Protection in Sophos is much less sophisticated. When a process accesses the webcam, it simply slides in a transient notification about that access. There's no blacklist or whitelist, and if you're not looking at the screen, you could miss the notification.
A Good Choice for the Right User
If you're enough of a techie to comprehend all of its features, Sophos Home Premium lets you install and remotely manage Sophos protection on up to 10 PCs or Macs. It earns good scores in our hands-on tests, and offers advanced features such as keylogger defense, ransomware protection, and exploit mitigation. Unfortunately, it doesn't have any current scores from the independent labs to prove its efficacy, though it scored well in our hands-on tests.
Sophos Home Premium is a good antivirus for the right user, but we've identified several Editors' Choice antivirus products that suit just about any user. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus consistently get excellent scores with the independent labs. McAfee AntiVirus Plus doesn't score as high, but if offers unlimited cross-platform licenses, not just for Windows and macOS but for Android and iOS as well. Finally, Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus packs unique and powerful behavior-based detection in a tiny package.
Bottom Line: Sophos Home Premium expands on basic antivirus with protection technology forged in the company's Enterprise-level products, but doesn't have lab results to verify its efficacy.
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