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Introducing Sophos Home – A simple (and free) way to protect your family online

Sophos HomeHappy holidays everyone! Given that many of us will be taking some time off to spend with family and friends, reflect on the past year, and reassess our home IT security posture, it feels like the perfect time to announce a new free tool that’s designed to bring to our commercial-grade Sophos security to all of your homes.

In a bout of creative genius, we decided to call it … Sophos Home. Clever, right?

We decided to do this because we’ve been hearing from employees, customers, partners, and friends that the existing solutions in the market aren’t working for them. We hear complaints about ineffective/cheap consumer technology and products loaded with nagging adware; security companies that sell your data to third parties; and some that still think homes only have a single PC. It seemed to us that no one has done a very good job of building a product designed for the modern family. We thought we could do better so we kicked off the Sophos Home project.

I’m really proud of what our designers and engineers have come up with. It’s a brilliantly simple online management dashboard that sits on top of enterprise-grade, sophisticated Mac and Windows endpoint protection technology to keep all of your computers and family members safe.

It even includes the ability to set restrictions on what kind of websites each computer has access to (my 12 year old is no longer spending his college savings on the Draft Kings fantasy football site).

I could spend a long time telling you about the cool behavioral detection tech that watches apps for malicious actions, or the instant checking we do to make sure the website you’re visiting hasn’t been compromised. The real point is that Sophos Home is industry-leading security tech, but with a new management system designed from the ground up for the home user … and it’s free!

We protect over 100 million employees today and we feel they need the same protection at home, as do their kids, their parents, and their friends. There are far too many threats out there: infected websites that silently drop malware on your computer just by visiting a webpage; ransomware that locks up all your precious files with encryption, and throws away the key unless you pay; and phishing websites set up by hackers to look just like your bank’s website to steal your passwords and drain your accounts.

It’s time for a better solution designed for today’s connected family.

So, give it a try and let us know what you think. Simply go to sophos.com/home and create your free account. Download and install it. That’s all you need to do!

You can also head over to Naked Security, where we’re offering a chance to win one of ten $20 gift cards to spend at the Sophos Store if you give us your thoughts on Sophos Home.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks for choosing Sophos, and may you and yours have a safe, secure and happy holidays.

UPDATE: The holidays may be over, but Sophos Home is the gift that keeps on giving. Try it now for free!

Try Sophos Home for free

18 Comments

I already have Sophos protection on 4 of my PC’s. Can I download the Home version on these PC’s so I can use the excellent interface for Web Category Access?

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Thanks for your question. Our engineers informed me that you need to uninstall existing Sophos products before you can install Sophos Home. For more information on this see our knowledgebase article. However, we believe Sophos Home will be an upgrade for you. You get the same great protection with Sophos Home as our commercial version, with the new cloud management console, improved UI on the agent, and the ability to manage multiple agents from a single cloud based console. And it is of course completely free. If you have any other questions, please check out our Sophos Home community board.

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Can we also protect at least web navigation on mobile devices too? (iPad I think inside home there are also tablets that chldren use

Thanx
Max

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Sophos Home only supports Windows and OS X, I’m afraid.

For mobile devices, you could try Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition (also free) that will do web filtering, email filtering, malware scanning, network instrusion prevention and more, but you’ll need a spare computer (or a spare virtual machine) in which to run it. Take a look here:

https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools.aspx

(Yes, the XG Firewall provides an additional layer of defence for your Sophos Home-protected laptops and desktops, too. If you push all your home network traffic through it, you essentially get two bites at the defensive cherry for your desktops and laptops.)

We also have a free security tool for Android (see above URL), but not for iOS. Apple won’t allow proper anti-virus security apps in the App Store, which is the only source of apps for iOs. This is because of strict limitations on what you’re allowed to do in a program that’s acceptable under App Store programming rules.

Apple’s theory seems to be to reduce the number of ways a third-party product might crash iOS, which is a noble ideal, but it effectively makes a real anti-virus impossible on the iOS platform.

HtH.

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Downloaded Sophos Home for windows and has been working trouble free so far. It boots up faster than Avast although it doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles that Avast had. So far I like it and plan to stay with it. I have windows 7 with 10 downloaded on it….

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Have added 4 PCs from my friends and family to Sophos Home. It’s lighter than the existing solutions (2 Kaspersky, 1 Mcafee and 1 Trend Micro PC) and the cloud dashboard to manage them is simply amazing. Best of all it’s nag free :)

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Not any more is it nag free! 6 months in and its nagging every flipping hour to upgrade to PREMIUM!
Way to go SOPHOS!! Does that ever work?

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I am not able to install it on win xp pro. It says upon installation that the OS is not compatible. Has Sophos stopped supporting Windows XP users?

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Hi Mahesh, Thanks for getting in contact. Sophos Home supports Windows 7 and up. If you have any further questions, we have a lot of information over on our Community here: https://community.sophos.com/products/sophos-home/ Hope that helps.

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How much of my private information is sent to Sophos?
Does Sophos get the contents of my mail or other documents on my machine? Does it get the filenames? Does it get the URLs of the websites I’m visiting?
It’s not that I don’t trust Sophos but we should not assume that Sophos is inviolate, given how many high-profile companies have had their data taken. Which makes me wary when it comes to sharing information to the cloud.
Please can we have some info, Sophos?
Kevin

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Hi Kevin, Thanks for your question. Sophos does not hold any personally identifiable information other than the email address you use to sign in and whatever you tell us your name is when you register (this does not need to be your real name). We also store the device names of your computers so that you can identify which is which. The information that our software sends back to Sophos is limited to what we need to identify malware or websites that you wish to block (for example, URLs that you browse to or checksums of executable files you open). However we do not store any of this data, with the exception of storing the URL of a malicious site or a site we have blocked for you or a site that you have chosen to block through policy. In this case we store the information so that you can see in your Sophos Home console which sites we have blocked for you. [edited]

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Would be really cool if you guys consider adding two-way firewall for Sophos Home, I know Sophos already offers something similar seperately but i feel like having a firewall built in to Sophos Home would be more easier for home users to setup.

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I’m really interested in the anti-malware protection of the Sophos Home (ala InterceptX) but will be running another anti-virus (heuristics based) engine (e.g. Kaspersky). Will Sophos Home be able to run together with Kaspersky anti-virus on a single Windows 7 computer?

Many thanks for making Sophos Home free and improving the security situation for everyone!

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Currently, Sophos Home cannot run alongside another antivirus program, like Kaspersky Antivirus. This is the case for many, if not all antivirus programs. However, second opinion scanners and removal tools, such as HitmanPro and HitmanPro.Alert, can run alongside Sophos Home and other antiviruses

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Does Sophos Home include a Firewall? I’m not speaking of a web-filtering firewall, but rather functionality of controlling the Windows firewall or similar?

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Hi Justin, no it doesn’t but it also doesn’t prevent you from running a firewall, such as Windows firewall, alongside the protection Sophos Home provides.

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