Sophos Home Premium Review
This is a flagship antivirus software offered in both free and premium variants. While the free variant comes with basic protection and a 30-day trial for other features, you get unrestricted access to the premium variant. The company claims that most of the real-time protection technology is taken from Sophos Intercept X which is their market-leading endpoint protection solution used by leading banks, government organizations and businesses.
Sophos Home is a complete suite and offers virus protection, ransomware protection, web filtering, computer reclamation and a lot more security features which have been descriptively covered in this article.
Remote Management Dashboard
Unlike conventional antivirus tools, Sophos does not come with a configurative panel or settings. Rather you can control your antivirus settings from a cloud-based dashboard. This does not only let you control your antivirus remotely from anywhere but also lets you manage more than one devices at a time. To login to your dashboard, you can visit the Sophos Website or click on Manage My Security from the Sophos Home window opened on your computer.
From this dashboard, you can view the status of your device, initiate new scans and change antivirus configuration.
Real-time Protection
Sophos Home comes with an outstanding real-time engine that constantly scans your computer for any kinds of threats. It is fully capable of removing all sorts of viruses and ransomware running on your computer. Any blocked activity or deleted files will show up in the History and program will also alert you to it. Real-time protection and other related features can be disabled, but it is not recommended to do so. Other than real-time protection, Sophos Home provides real-time malicious traffic detection that can detect any programs connecting to malicious web servers. PUA (Potentially Unwanted Application) protection can also block unwanted applications in real time.
Ransomware Protection
Sophos Home comes with an inbuilt ransomware protection engine that guards your computers against all kinds of ransomware. It can detect any activity being carried out by ransomware and can also help you decrypt any affected files. This feature became quite important after recent ransomware attacks and vulnerabilities exposed. The tool can also protect the MBR (Master Boot Record) so that the ransomware cannot destroy your computer’s storage configuration.
Web Protection
As a majority of the virus comes from the internet these days, having proper web protection in place is a must. Sophos Home comes with all the necessary features that an internet user requires in order to stay protected from viruses coming from the internet. The tool can automatically block websites that have been reported as unsafe or contain any malware. The Download Reputation feature uses a reputational scoring model to rate your downloads and judge whether they are safe or not.
If you are an avid net-banking user, then you can rely on Sophos for providing you a safe and secure browsing experience. The antivirus program blocks all sorts of keyloggers so that your sensitive information is always safe and secure. Moreover, it can warn you if your web browser has been compromised so that you can avoid entering any sensitive information. Since most of the web protection features are based on relative scores and feedback collected from various users, it might happen that a website that you want to access is blocked. So, you can easily add any such website in the exceptions list, and it will be not be blocked by Sophos anymore.
Web Filtering
If you are a parent and want to block some content on your child’s device, Sophos Home can do that for you. Under Web Filtering settings, you can find a lot of categories that can be blocked. There are three levels of filtering available. You can allow or block a website. Or you can simply warn the user that he/she is trying to access some restricted content. Using web filtering, you can easily block social networks, chat platforms, news and general interest blogs, dating websites, adult & sexually explicit content, hacking, drugs, violence and related websites on your child’s computer. You can also add exceptions for websites that you wish to allow.
Privacy
This section only has one feature as of now, and that is webcam protection. If any application tries to use the webcam, Sophos Home will show you a notification regarding that. Enabling this feature will not allow any application to use webcam without your consent. Sophos Home makes up a good antivirus and security tool. It does not only offer features of a conventional antivirus but tries to integrate business-grade features into a product meant to be used by home users. The best part about the tool is the cloud management of devices. You can manage and configure all your devices from a single dashboard. This also makes monitoring a little easier, as you are easily notified with the help of Alerts if anything goes wrong on any of the computers.
Buy Sophos Home
Sophos Home has a free variant available which offers real-time protection, web filtering, web protection and remote management. But most of the advanced features like privacy protection, safe internet banking, etc, are a part of the paid variant. You can manage up to 3 devices in a single free account and up to 10 devices with a paid account. We recommend that you buy Sophos Home Premium from its official website, and keep your Windows PC protected at all times. The cost is $50 for 1 year for 10 devices – but you will get a special discount of 20%.
