Sophos Home is a site licensed product designed to allow Faculty, Staff and Students access up to 10 systems simultaneously. For more information please visit the Sophos Home Support Page.
Sophos Home comes equipped with an essential parental content filtering system, blocking sites that fall under General Interest, Social Networking & Computing and Adult & Potentially Inappropriate categories. Furthermore, Sophos Home protects against an array of malicious software – from ransomware to keyloggers – and can protect its users.
Features
Sophos Home is an excellent program to protect against malware and other cyber threats, including remote scanning capabilities that let you connect to a central account and scan devices remotely, while its real-time protection features provide comprehensive real-time protection and two-factor authentication; its password manager offers strong protection. Furthermore, Sophos offers mobile applications that offer strong protection as well as two-factor authentication and two-factor authentication; however its desktop app may lack some key features such as QR code scanning or an authenticator.
Sophos Free offers some less-powerful features, including limited scanning options and no scheduled anti-virus updates. However, its basic features still include antivirus protection and web protection – web protection being designed to guard devices while online by blocking websites with certain content such as drug promotion or violence promotion sites.
Sophos’ technology also aids the program in fighting ransomware attacks. Its CryptoGuard defenses can quickly identify an encryption attack in its early stages, replacing affected files with copies. If your computer becomes locked by ransomware, Sophos will even wipe its memory and reboot to ensure that infection cannot return.
Other security technologies offered by Sophos include a firewall, VPN and Sophos Web Security for email and online apps, machine learning to block phishing attacks and prevent keystroke logging and webcam takeover, file shredding to permanently delete sensitive data permanently and parental controls which allow parents to limit screen time or block certain programs or websites for their children.
This program’s interface is user-friendly, featuring a quick scan feature without requiring internet connectivity. The Status page shows a green checkmark to indicate active and protected software while My Activity and Settings links launch a web portal for managing accounts – however this two-pronged approach may prove challenging for those accustomed to more centralised systems.
Sophos offers customer support through an online knowledgebase and email ticketing system, as well as staffers available from 8am to 8pm ET Monday to Friday (free versions provide prewritten knowledgebase articles while paid ones provide fuller services).
Pricing
Sophos is an industry leader when it comes to cybersecurity software for enterprises, offering security features trusted by Fortune 500 companies – making their Sophos Home Premium offering even more accessible – providing home users with remote management for up to 10 Windows or macOS devices at an economical price and designed to be user-friendly.
Sophos Home offers a centralized management dashboard accessible from any internet-enabled device – the cloud management dashboard allows you to monitor how each of your devices are protected and make changes from anywhere. Sophos Home includes various protection modules like firewall protection, web and ransomware protection and cloud anti-malware – as well as parental control and content filtering features to block websites by category such as General Interest, Social Networking & Computing or Adult & Potentially Inappropriate or create lists of websites you would like whitelisted.
Sophos Home Premium performed extremely well against malware during our tests, with its quick scan being fast and thorough and its full scan being even quicker. In addition, Sophos blocked numerous threats ranging from ransomware to Trojans; although, unfortunately it wasn’t able to detect all newer ones.
Sophos Home provides its anti-malware cloud service as an invaluable asset to businesses. This powerful feature enables organizations to track how their organization is being attacked by malicious code, and even stop attacks before they happen. Furthermore, the service serves as an excellent means of protecting employees against data loss through protecting against malware infections.
Sophos Home is an excellent solution for businesses in need of robust antivirus protection for multiple devices, with features including malware removal, ransomware protection and web security – making it suitable for businesses of any size. Installation and use are straightforward thanks to an intuitive user interface – perfect for beginners. Sophos Home can be downloaded for both Windows and Mac operating systems and includes a free trial period.
Reliability
Sophos Home is an excellent antivirus program for any individual or family that needs the ability to protect multiple devices simultaneously. It costs less than similar programs with similar feature sets and does an outstanding job at protecting systems against malware and other threats. If remote management or more robust features aren’t essential to you, other solutions exist with similar prices that provide similar coverage.
Sophos’ Intercept X technology protects systems against malware by employing three independent layers of protection: first is Sophos’ malware scanner and database which look for threats; secondly is behavioral analysis which watches for early signs of an intrusion; thirdly it sends suspicious files for further analysis by Sophos engineers – together these three elements work to identify and eliminate even the most dangerous threats.
Sophos Home Premium performed extremely well during testing, with an impressive detection rate of 98%. Furthermore, it blocked all web browser add-ons on our test system in order to thwart potential malware downloads; furthermore it can prevent attacks against UEFI motherboard firmware as well as PowerShell or sideloading exploits from exploiting any vulnerabilities present on it.
As with most consumer-grade antivirus programs, Sophos Home offers two versions – free and premium – with the former not participating in lab tests by AV-Test or AV Comparatives and lacking its remote management feature. Conversely, premium has an improved detection rate as well as remote management capability.
Sophos’ mobile application gives users the power to manage security across all of their systems. While the Android version may be slightly outdated, it still can scan for malware and block dangerous websites; on iOS however, its more modern counterpart can even detect man-in-the-middle attacks against mobile devices.
Sophos boasts an excellent customer support department, offering live chat and email assistance for its premium users, but free users only gain access to an prewritten knowledgebase. While this may suffice for some, Sophos should provide comprehensive customer care service instead.
Installation
Sophos Home installs a small local agent on every protected computer and manages its configuration and logging remotely through an online dashboard, similar to how IT departments typically take care of antivirus management remotely rather than employing staff on-site for this task. However, this also makes sense in a consumer environment.
The web-based dashboard provides a user-friendly interface, making it simple for anyone to understand. It displays all devices as well as threats, phishing attempts and suspicious activities detected. Each device also receives its own row of icons representing its level of protection.
Clicking any of the rows brings up a more in-depth report about that device’s status, while on the left-hand side are links to settings, with each option represented as a panel in the center of the screen. Some have advanced options while others simply offer on/off switches with no further configuration choices available.
Sophos Home runs a full scan on each device it detects to identify which files or programs may pose threats, then displays its results in its Web dashboard for users to either allow or block, along with further details about these threats.
This basic version, available for free download, protects against known viruses, malware, Trojans, worms and bots as well as blocking phishing sites, spyware programs and ransomware attacks. Furthermore, it requires Windows operating system version 7 or later for optimal functioning.
Users can secure up to three PCs and Mac computers with the free version, or upgrade to Sophos Home Premium for just $10 per month to cover up to 10 systems with features like Intercept X’s security engine that monitors known threats against new and emerging malware threats.
Sophos’ customer support services offer access to a prewritten knowledgebase article for free users, while paid subscribers have access to email or live chat support and live chat sessions as well. Unfortunately, Sophos’ knowledgebase articles do not cover many common issues completely.
