• Pros Certified by one independent antivirus lab. Webcam protection. Very good phishing protection. Ransomware protection. Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac OS X release notes Version 8 To install Sophos Anti-Virus so that it is managed by Enterprise Console, see the startup guides on the Enterprise Console page. Remote management. Simple parental control. • Cons Parental content filter foiled by secure anonymizing proxy. Lacks exploit protection, malware deep-clean, download reputation check, keylogger protection, and other advanced features found in the Windows edition. • Bottom Line Sophos Home Premium offers Mac antivirus protection at a very reasonable price, but the absence of many advanced features found in the Windows edition is disappointing. ![]() Sophos is a big name in enterprise-level security. With Sophos Home Premium on the Mac and the corresponding Windows product, the developers have brought a good dollop of that high-powered to ordinary users. ![]() Even the free products (on both platforms) offer convenient and powerful protection. Paying for Premium gets you a boatload of advanced features on Windows. Alas, most of these don't make it over to the macOS edition. Sophos Home Premium still provides good protection for Mac users at a reasonable price, however. Big businesses don't leave antivirus protection to their untrained employees. Rather, the IT Security department manages everything remotely. Sophos Home works the same way. You sign up for an online account, then either download the product to the device you're using or send an email link to install it elsewhere. All configuration occurs in the online console. Are you the go-to tech support agent for your family? With Sophos, instead of having to drive across town to help Cousin Mel with her antivirus, you can handle it all remotely. Pricing and OS Support Mac users often justify skipping antivirus protection on the basis that there just isn't a lot of Mac malware. Why spend money on something you might not need? Mac malware is on the rise, however, so you really should install protection. The most common price point for Mac antivirus is just under $40 per year for a single license. Half of the current products fit that model, and most of those give you three licenses for $59.99 per year. With, that $59.99 subscription price gets you not three licenses but unlimited licenses. You can install it on all the macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS devices in your household. Compared to these commercial products (well, perhaps all but McAfee), Sophos is a bargain. For $50 you can install Sophos Home Premium on up to 10 devices, Mac or PC, and manage them remotely. At $5 per device per year, it isn't free, but it sure isn't expensive. My experience has been that Mac users are more likely to keep their operating systems fully updated than their Windows-loving counterparts. Even so, not everyone has the very latest macOS installed. Like McAfee, Sophos supports older versions back to Yosemite (10.10). That's a change since the previous edition, which went all the way back to Mountain Lion (10.8)., Norton, and Trend Micro require at least El Capitan (10.11), the toughest OS requirement of my current collection of Mac antivirus products. Online Dashboard Differences As with the free edition, clicking Manage Devices or Preferences from the Sophos widget's menu takes you to the online dashboard. You can also just log in directly from any browser. The main page lists your protected devices. If you haven't used up all 10 licenses, you can click Add Device to either install on the device you're using or send a link by email. If you've replaced one of your computers, you can remove it from the dashboard, freeing up that license for reuse. The difference between the Windows and macOS editions are more pronounced in the premium edition. You just get more with on Windows. The Status page looks the same, with panels for Antivirus Protection, Web Protection, Ransomware Protection, Privacy Protection, and Malicious Traffic Detection, but when you dig deeper the differences become evident. The General sub-page, below Protection, looks the same on both platforms. Clicking Ransomware gets you a simple on/off switch for Ransomware Protection, but the Master Boot Record Protection component, available for Windows devices, isn't there. The Exploits sub-page, home to the most advanced features, doesn't appear at all for Macs. That means you don't get protection against known attacks on vulnerable applications. You don't get the somewhat-arcane Risk Reduction features. Since there are no protected applications, you also don't get the glowing green border and see-through tags that identify such applications in Windows.
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March 2019
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