
- SOPHOS REVIEWS INSTALL
- SOPHOS REVIEWS FULL
- SOPHOS REVIEWS ANDROID
- SOPHOS REVIEWS PRO
- SOPHOS REVIEWS SOFTWARE
SOPHOS REVIEWS FULL
Subsequent full scans averaged 4:37 indicating that Sophos had learned which files to skip. Sophos Home Premium's first system scan took a speedy 8 minutes and 32 seconds, although it didn't tell us how many files it examined. That’s heavier than ESET's very light scans, but about average for the category and much better than McAfee's full scan, which nearly doubles the system load. At the other extreme, Bitdefender's background hit was a large 19%.ĭuring full system scans, the benchmark completion time rose to an average of 15 seconds, a 47% performance shortfall from the baseline and a 39% increase on the background load. This rose to 10.8 seconds after Sophos was installed, a 6% drop in performance potential that's a bit below the average (in a good way) of all the 2021 antivirus we've seen so far. System performance impact as of January 2021 System hitīefore we installed Sophos Home Premium on the ThinkPad, the benchmark test finished in 10.2 seconds, which we used as a baseline.
SOPHOS REVIEWS SOFTWARE
However, the software can't filter sites by age group, lock out apps or schedule online time. Parents can choose from 28 blockable topics, from adult content to weapons. Other antivirus brands reserve parental controls for their priciest products, but Sophos includes web filtering with both Home and Home Premium.
SOPHOS REVIEWS INSTALL
It takes about five minutes to install either. Instead of one firewall to replace the Windows one, Sophos has two free downloadable firewall options: XG Firewall Home Edition (opens in new tab) and Sophos UTM Home Edition (opens in new tab). Most antivirus products use their own browser extensions to block known malicious websites, but Sophos Home and Home Premium go old-school, with a database of malicious sites built right into the core antivirus software. By contrast, Kaspersky had perfect 100% scores both times. That's even worse than Sophos' 88% score in the previous round. In October-December 2020 tests by London-based SE Labs, Sophos fell well behind the pack with an 86% protection score, letting eight out of 100 pieces of malware infect a test machine. Bitdefender, ESET, Kaspersky and Microsoft all got 99.8% or 99.9% detection scores in the enterprise tests. The testing of Intercept X by AV-Comparatives in August through November mirrors these results with an overall 98.3% score. In the same tests, the enterprise software of every other premium antivirus brand we regularly review detected 100% of zero-day malware from July through October. In AV-TEST's November-December 2020 enterprise round, Sophos finally aced all four tests, the first time it had done so in a year.

It detected 100% of the widespread malware in all of AV-TEST's 2020 evaluations from January through October but missed quite a few of the zero-days. Overall, Sophos Intercept X Endpoint was stronger at finding and removing known, widespread malware threats than brand-new "zero-day" ones.

Latest lab-test results as of January 2021
SOPHOS REVIEWS PRO
If that's not enough, Sophos offers free stand-alone security tools and utilities (opens in new tab), including the Hitman Pro malware removal applications and two software firewalls. Sophos Anti-Virus for Linux is free and compatible with most major 64-bit Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu, but it isn't integrated into the PC and Mac software.

SOPHOS REVIEWS ANDROID
There are Intercept X apps for phones and tablets that require at least Android version 5.0 or iOS version 11. Macs require macOS 10.12 (Sierra) through 10.15 (Catalina), but the latest macOS 11.0.1 (Big Sur) release only protects against malware in the coming months, Sophos will add website blocking to its repertoire. Sophos Home Premium is based on the company's business-minded Intercept X security software and works with Windows 7 (with Service Pack 1) through Windows 10. There's no hardened browser, but Sophos can encrypt keystrokes, stop potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) and block known dangerous websites, and its online account lets you remotely scan your other computers as long as they're online.Ĭlearly, it's for antivirus customers who value price and simplicity over having every last security and privacy feature.

Sophos Home Premium uses machine learning to block phishing and ransomware attacks and webcam and microphone snooping.
