There are a wide variety of security products available to protect and defend your Mac from viruses, hackers, ransomware and other types of malicious attacks.
Sophos might not be the first name that comes to mind, but that doesn’t mean its products aren’t worth considering. For the average consumer, the company sells a program called Sophos Home Premium.
Designed for macOS, Sophos Home Premium offers security protection organized into five different categories: antivirus protection, protection against malicious websites, protection against ransomwareprivacy protection and malicious traffic detection.
A while ago, Sophos offered a free version of Sophos Home that included antivirus protection and website protection. At the end of 2021, the company stopped offering this version, leaving Sophos Home Premium as the only option for personal use.
You can use Home Premium for free and full for 30 days through the free trial, but after that you will have to pay €37.46 for the first year and €49.95 for each subsequent year. For that price, though, you’ll be able to install the software on up to 10 PCs and/or Macs.
In my case, I tried Home Premium on two different MacBook Airs, one with an Intel chip and one with an M1 chip. I didn’t run into any compatibility issues with the M1, so the product worked effectively on both machines.
Installation and configuration
Installing and setting up Sophos Home Premium seems smooth at first, but then comes the confusion.
After installing, the software It guides you through the process of granting the necessary permissions to be able to function. But then the setup stops without you clearly knowing what to do next.
To continue, you must log in to the control panel on the Sophos Home web and you will be able to configure each component of the softwaresomething I only knew I needed to do after looking at the help documentation on-line.
No icon appears in the Dock to start the program. You will see several icons in the Applications folder, but none of them do anything. Luckily, there is an icon in the menu bar that allows you to access the online control panel and other functions.
Once in the panel, you will be able to see and configure each of the five types of protection.
Virus protection offers real-time scanning for your local and network drives. Through the settings page, you can start a manual scanner or schedule it for a specific day or days or at a specific time.
By default, the program automatically removes the malware it discovers, though you can tell it to quarantine malicious items if you want to review or inspect them.
You can run a scan from the online control panel or from the program’s menu bar icon. Triggering a scan from the menu bar icon is the best option as you can choose a quick scan or a full scan and run the scan even if you are offline.
Web protection settings block websites that are known to spread malware, but you can add exceptions. protection against ransomware try to prevent the malware detected encrypt your files.
Privacy protection alerts you to any unwanted attempts to access your webcam or microphone. And malicious traffic detection looks for programs trying to connect to a malicious server.
You can use the web filtering setting to block websites based on specific areas, such as gambling, hackingillegal drugs, sex education, violence and weapons.
Is Sophos efficient at detecting malware? The program is tested as frequently as other more popular products. However, an analysis of software AV-Test’s 2017 security update for macOS gave Sophos Home an excellent score in the areas of protection, performance, and ease of use.
I also ran an EICAR test, which simulates a virus, and Sophos detected and blocked it with no problem. Website filtering worked fine when I tried to launch sites associated with blocked categories. Safari told me I couldn’t access them, but I was able to open those same sites with filtering turned off.
Verdict
Sophos Home Premium offers effective protection, but the setup process and cloud-only features are some of its weak bridges. It would need to offer a clearer setup process and the ability to do more locally.
Original article published in Macworld UK.
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