Many of you are your family’s IT Manager. You’re the help desk when something goes wrong, and you’re the saviour who can fix it all.
And you’re the one who ends up dealing with that 11pm phone call from your Auntie Linda on Christmas Eve saying she’s staring at a blue screen with lots of funny numbers and letters.
If that’s you, then you might be interested to know about our new free tool – Sophos Home.
It’s Sophos’s known and trusted business-grade product, but for home users.
You probably know that Sophos has been offering free Mac antivirus for a while, but this is the first product that protects both Macs and PCs in your home. If you’re already a Sophos Antivirus for Mac user then you can switch to Sophos Home now!
What’s really useful is that it’s cloud managed, so you can look after security for your whole family, from anywhere, with an easy-to-use web console. Yes, even Auntie Linda’s.
It’s the first totally free home security product – free from annoying pop-ups, free from ads, free from complicated security settings. And, of course, it’s free from costing anything!
If this all sounds interesting, and you’re one of those people that likes to be in there first, trying out new stuff, then this is for you.
We’d also love to know what you think of it. If you fill in our feedback form after you’ve played around with it, we’ll put you in the draw to win one of ten $20 gift cards to use on the Sophos Store – you can use it on laptop stickers, T-shirts, lunchboxes, slap bands, or many other products.
To be in with a chance of winning a gift card, please include your email address when you fill in the form. Or if you just want to let us know what you think of the product, then just leave that field blank.
Gift card giveaway closes on Friday 15 January 2016. For full competition terms and conditions, see here.
Luke
Not the first totally free home security product, various competitors did that months ago with theirs.. Though I look forward to testing / using and seeing if Sophos has upped their game in virus detections and support, as last time both were horrible..
Steven
Is this compatible with other security systems? (I have Webroot – which once upon a time used Sophos!) I would be happy to try your product, as long as there are no compatibility problems.
Paul Ducklin
I don’t think any anti-virus product vendor would recommend having two on-access (a.k.a. real-time) virus filters active at the same time, if only for performance reasons.
If you want to try out our product first while your incumbent product is still active, you could always try our free Virus Removal Tool for Windows. This does not have an on-access component and is designed to run alongside your existing anti-virus as a sort of “second opinion.”
Check the “free tools” bar in this article…
R3v3ngineer
My concern starts with “cloud” protection. How much of my traffic are you monitoring and/or reselling to subsidize the “free” part of this equation?
Paul Ducklin
Most of Sophos Home is actually installed and works locally on your computer, just like the regular business version. We don’t proxy your web traffic “in the cloud” (like, for example, Opera Mini); we don’t receive your email for you (like, for example, Gmail); and so forth. So we don’t really “monitor your traffic” in the way that phrase is usually used.
The “cloud protection” part is based on queries from your computer to our servers to do real-time lookups when needed to help detect and block new threats.
For example, if you run a brand new program that you just downloaded, we’ll automatically scan it first using the locally-installed virus detection engine and associated detection data. This protection works whether you are online or not. But if you are online, we’ll also do a real-time lookup of some salient data from that program – such as checksums of parts or all of the file – to see if SophosLabs has recently flagged that file, or something like it, as suspicious. This helps to close the detection gap since the last time the local detection data was updated. This protection does not involve redirecting all your software downloads through Sophos’s servers and filtering them there.
We do something similar when we see you are about to visit a new URL – a real-time lookup to see whether the Labs guys have recently flagged that web destination as dangerous, or added it to one of our filtered categories. This is similar to the fraud/scam/phishing filter in a browser like Firefox, and is based on live lookups of URLs against a central database. This protection does not involve redirecting all your web content through Sophos’s servers and filtering it there.
For legalistic details, I suggest you look at our End User License Agreement, notably section 13: Confidentiality and Data Protection..
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/legal/sophos-end-user-license-agreement.aspx
There’s also the Sophos Group Privacy Policy, notably the section on Sophos Home Products…
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/legal/sophos-group-privacy-policy.aspx
The part of Sophos Home that doesn’t run locally, and is therefore entirely cloud-based, is the management console, which you access from your browser.
We did it this way so you don’t need to install a console client, a management server, a database engine, and so forth, on your home network. Your Sophos Home console keeps track of your devices, their names, their operating system versions, when they last updated, what threats were detected recently, and more, as you might expect. Obviously, all of that information is stored on Sophos servers, or else the system wouldn’t work.
When you login to Sophos Home, all you see is your own console, which can manage up to 10 computers (Windows or Mac).
Tasks available from the console include: viewing a list of recent events on your protected computers (e.g, virus detections); changing the settings individually on each device (e.g. turning off Web Protection if you don’t want us to know which URLs you are browsing to); kicking off on-demand malware scans; and uninstalling the product from a computer.
I know this is not a definitive answer, but I hope it helps.
We’re not in the business of selling ads, so we aren’t interested in figuring out what you’re interested in, if you know what I mean :-)
Mark Turner
Sophos home is an awesome product! Only started to install it yesterday on my families devices but its the first class product that I would expect from Sophos. Simple, easy to understand interface with little interaction required from the end user. The cloud / web management for your devices blows other free products out of the water and it will make management so easy. I have waited for years for Sophos to release a product for home users – finally they have and it’s be worth the wait! Well done and Thank you Sophos.
Paul Ducklin
We’re delighted that you’re delighted :-)
I’m walking the walk – I had the non-Home versions on my Mac and in my Windows VM (a perk of working for Sophos :-), but I switched over to Sophos Home as soon as we announced it on the Sophos Blog and Naked Security. Just so I could say I’d done so…and it’s great!
(I know this is trite, but I love that 3D effect you get when you toggle the main https://home.sophos.com/ page between the “Create Account” and “Log In” windows…try it a few times and have a smile ;-)
Ken Driver (@KennyD555)
It disabled Dashlane in Firefox browser. Also got a BSOD while trying to repair Dashlane extension. Had to uninstall your product.
Paul Ducklin
If you could share some details in our forum, that would be nice:
https://community.sophos.com/products/sophos-home/
We can’t really offer support here – and, anyway, you haven’t given us much to go on. (I haven’t seen a BSOD for years, at least on recent versions of Windows. The Sophos components may have been involved without being the actual cause, of course.)
Sorry that we can’t say much more than that.