
You can also share Sophos with others if you find that it meets your needs and think it will meet theirs. The client-side user interface is lightweight and give you controls for scanning, adding additional devices, tracking your activity, and tweaking your settings. If you’re looking for something that is easy to use, Sophos Home Premium will probably fit the bill. An antivirus needs to build confidence for users that it will protect your system, and in this case, we did not find that confidence. We were also disheartened by the catch of the tracking cookies that the application failed to remove on multiple occasions. However, there were a couple of items the application failed to catch. In our own tests, Sophos did catch potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) and most of the malware we unleashed. Unfortunately, however, there aren’t any recent independent lab tests to back that up, and even other reviewers have widely mixed reviews of how well Sophos will protect your system. Of those types of malware, it does the best job of protecting users from ransomware. Sophos claims to protect users from all types of malware, Zero-Day threats, phishing, privacy concerns, keyloggers, and ransomware. Types of Malware: Not Entirely Trustworthy By default, many of these options are enabled on install, but you can also add website exceptions and harden website blocking. You can also set protection for exploits, ransomware, and malicious websites. Digging further into that interface you’ll find you have the ability to schedule automatic weekly scans, which is not enabled when the application is installed, and which cannot be set to daily scans. There, you can find a log of the scans that have been conducted, as well as the ability to further configure Antivirus Protection, Web Protection, Ransomware Protection, Privacy Protection, and Malicious Traffic Detection. You’ll also find some scanning controls in the web-based interface for Sophos Home Premium (called Sophos Cloud). This initial scan will take around 20 minutes to complete.
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Immediately upon installing Sophos Home Premium, it will launch into a full scan of your system. We clicked the option to remove the cookies from our system, but the removal process failed on all 200 of them, multiple times. Except in the case of the tracking cookies. A quick click when something is found will remove it. And the initial scan is a good, deep scan that in our test system found remnants of two viruses that we’d previously removed as well as more than 200 tracking cookies.

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This initial scan will take around 20 minutes to complete (unless you’re using the free version, then plan to wait two-three times that for the scan to finish).

Scan Locations: More Control Than is Apparent That means if you need those additional tools, you’ll have to pay more for them from a third-party vendor. Also absent is a hardened browser, email protection, anti-spam, or a VPN.

Notably missing from Sophos Home Premium’s protection is a firewall. Also absent is a hardened browser, e-mail protection, anti-spam, or a VPN.Īdded to the basic protection Sophos Home Premium also includes privacy protection that will secure your webcam and protect you when you’re moving around the Internet as well as parental controls that let you determine what sites your children can and cannot visit.
