I have a certain set of rules that I follow when evaluating these programs. How I Evaluate Antivirus Programs – What I Look For However, it’s a great bargain at $60 to protect 10 systems and has extras others can only dream of.At the beginning of each year, manufacturers of antiviruses and antimalware start releasing the latest versions of their programs… each one proclaiming to be the best. Home Premium’s low cost and low background performance drop are encouraging but the security app is one of the slowest to scan through a computer. Its reliance on the Sophos Central online portal is a double-edged sword with easy access and remote scanning but this goes too far at times with things like scan scheduling which would best be left to local control. Still, it lacks things like a password manager, firewall and VPN and doesn’t participate in third party antivirus testing, so its malware stopping abilities are open to question. With extra layers of protection to encrypt computer keystrokes and guard against webcam takeovers, Sophos Home Premium does more than several other Mac security programs. There are a lot of DIY resources though which include help with setup and configuring the app as well as a deep knowledge base with thousands of answers. It’s used for anything from starting a scan to setting defensive priorities. Rather than concentrate on the local app, Sophos Home Premium divides its duties between local and web control. A quick scan looked at 3,998 files and took 12.9 seconds on the first run, which decreased to 2.2 seconds after two runs. To its credit, Sophos Home Premium program looked at 2,563,542 items for a full system scan making it among the most careful and comprehensive Mac malware scanners available. As such, it might be best to run a full scan using the scheduler while you’re asleep. It didn’t improve its speed as it learned the ins and outs of the system and what can be safely ignored the way others did. The first run took 3 hours and 11 minutes, making it the slowest of the bunch. If you’re in a hurry, don’t run a full system scan. A quick scan showed a slightly less burdensome performance degradation of 3.4% with a score of 19,231. It’s better than the 6.3% fall that Intego X9 showed but not as good as Bitdefender’s 1.0% drop. Still, any of these changes are unlikely to be discerned by a user.ĭuring a Full system scan, the benchmark result fell to 19,188, a drop of 3.6%. This performance potential drop of 0.5% won’t be noticed, and it’s between the 0.2% drop that Malwarebytes Premium + Privacy experienced and the 2.1% drop for McAfee Total Protection. After loading the app, the system had a Compute tally of 19,798. Our test system was a Mac Mini with a 3.2GHz M1 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (223GB unused).īefore the Sophos Home software was loaded, the Mac Mini scored a 19,900 on the GeekBench 5 Compute benchmark, a baseline result that was similar to its competitors. This software gauges overall system performance with an emphasis on gaming, video editing and other high-end operations. To measure the performance impact of Sophos Home Premium and compare it to other Mac malware programs, we used the GeekBench 5 Compute benchmark to assess its performance potential at critical points. Sophos Home Premium review: Performance and system impact There’s neither a password manager nor a firewall but Sophos engineers are working on incorporating Mac firewall controls into the next version. Sophos Home Premium also lacks several mainstays of the security business that others provide in part or whole. This not only allows for frequent updates but works with any browser. It can block problematic sites from within the main program. Rather than rely on browser extensions to thwart sites with a reputation for distributing malware, Sophos Home Premium has a better way. Sophos Home Premium review: Security and privacy features However, the program’s effectiveness on Mac is an open question.ĭuring the two-week review process, the program didn’t find anything dangerous on the test computer. The Windows antivirus programs participate and do reasonably well. Like with Malwarebytes and McAfee, Sophos does not participate in third-party evaluations for its Mac products with AV-Test or AV Comparatives. Sophos Home Premium review: Antivirus performance It can’t, however, scan an iPhone or iPad when connected to a Mac with a USB cable like Intego X9 can. Unlike others, Home Premium can find and block Windows malware on macOS. It can also stop phishing attempts and potentially unwanted apps from being installed. While the Windows version has protection against four dozen known classes of exploits and can stop side-loading malware, the Mac version can catch traditional threats, like trojans, worms and bots.
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