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Sophos Home Edition version 9.5 Preview

bobcook

The engineering team for Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac is happy to announce the availability of a preview of our next significant release for Home Edition. You can download this installer directly from our site using this link:

http://www.sophos.com/Pages/DownloadRedirect.aspx?downloadKey={8579BC43-753D-48D0-8C74-60593FEB7097}

Follow that link, accept the EULA, run the installer. It will automatically upgrade an existing 9.4 installation to version 9.5 if required. Your existing settings will be preserved during the upgrade.

This update improves stability and performance. No new features, but it addresses issues reported here in the forum and from our business customers.

NOTE: this version requires Mac OS X 10.8 or newer. It will not install and will not run on Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.7.

Now for the FAQ:

  • Is this the same as Sophos Home? No this is the "classic" Home Edition. The team working on Sophos Home will be incorporating this new version into their product in the coming months.
  • What does Preview mean? We aren't yet releasing this to all users. We want to get your feedback first, from willing volunteers. Once we are satified this release is good enough for everyone we'll automatically upgrade to this version.
  • Should I reboot after installation? Not required immediately but doing so will purge the old kernel drivers from memory.
  • Any new features? Not really. This release contains a full rewrite of the on-access scanning subsystem to improve system stability and reduce overall memory usage. This release also runs the content scanner as an unpriviliged user, same as the web scanner in the past, as security best-practice. You may notice scheduled scans or scanning from the Finder is snappier though.
  • Is it safe to run? You've tested it, right? Yes this release has passed our internal quality assurance process. We have been running this version internally for a while now, it has proven quite stable.

Please post any issues you have, we definitely want to hear about your experience as soon as possible. Thank you!



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  • 0 in reply to bobcook

     No problems to report, at least so far. Good news is less interruption/lower CPU consumption during and after after definitions update

  • 0 in reply to brvx

    Hello brvx, thanks for the positive feedback, much appreciated!

    ---

    Bob Cook (bob.cook@sophos.com) Director, Software Development

  • 0 in reply to bobcook

    bobcook said:

    ...which preference setting you checked. There is one for On-Access scanning (in Preferences) as well as a separate one for each Custom scan (in the Options panel)...

    That's the explanation because in the window that opens when "Open Scans..." is selected, Scan Settings offers the Adware and PUA scans again and in this case it was not selected. Once selected, when the scan was run again, the Log showed "Scan for adware and potentially unwanted applications (PUA): Yes" in Configuration.


    However, that selection can be made independently for each of the Custom Scans and the default "Scan Local Drives" but only the "Scan Local Drives" setting applies to Finder Scans. Moreover, the Scan Settings window that opens when a scan in selected only shows the small statement that "These settings apply also to items scanned from Finder" when the default scan (Scan Local Drives) is selected and then only when the Options button within the Settings panel is selected. Since one of the very useful features of Sophos is the right-click Finder scan which doesn't require opening the Sophos application at all from the Menu bar, perhaps putting the options for a Finder scan in the general Preferences panel as a separate item rather than in the right-click menu in the window for defined scans ("Open Scans...">"Scan Local Drives") might make the options more obvious.

  • 0 in reply to ZRL1

    Thanks for the feedback, your suggestion makes sense. We will be revisiting the UI in a future project and I'll recommend separating out the settings for Finder Scans into their own panel.

    ---

    Bob Cook (bob.cook@sophos.com) Director, Software Development

  • 0

    Question for Bob: when the 9.5 goes live will the older 9.4.2, which still works on 10.6, be EOL? Or will 10.6 users be able to continue with the 9.4.2 and continue to receive definitions updates?

  • 0 in reply to brvx

    When we release 9.5 in the first week of August, it will go to all endpoints. Anyone still running 10.6 or 10.7 will no longer receive updates (the AutoUpdate process will fail, as the new installer package will not run). This is consistent with the past behavior when we stopped supporting 10.5, and its what we promised when we announced the end of support for 10.6 and 10.7 more than a year ago.

    ---

    Bob Cook (bob.cook@sophos.com) Director, Software Development

  • 0 in reply to bobcook

    Hi Bob,

    Since it appears to be a matter of the 9.4.2 no longer receiving definitions updates, would this work to keep my 10.6.5/ 9.4.2 going after 9.4.2 EOL: Move over (preserving ownership) the entire av-data folder (which contains all the ide/vdb binaries) from my 10.8.5 or 10.9.5/ 9.4.2, located in /Library/Caches/com.sophos.sau/CID/Sophos Installer Components to my 10.6/ 9.4.2, same location?

    Just checked after updating Sophos in those volumes, and the 9.5 and the 9.4.2 appear to contain exactly the same ide/vdb files.

  • 0 in reply to brvx

    This procedure will work, at least for a while. We cannot commit that it work indefinitely, as future software updates will certainly introduce new capabilities to the VDB/IDE files. When that occurs (and the VDB/IDE files start using those new features) we cannot guarantee what will happen (we don't test unsupported software combinations). In the best of situations, everything works. In the worst situation, nothing works at all.

    ---

    Bob Cook (bob.cook@sophos.com) Director, Software Development

  • 0 in reply to bobcook

    Thanks Bob, That it might eventually fail, or get dicey, wasn't unexpected.


    One more consideration: when the 9.5 goes live, should I turn off automatic updating at the 9.4.2? Would an update for the 9.5 fail and possibly end up borking the 9.4.2 installation?

  • 0

    Just noticed, I have several just like this one for the 9.5. Can give full report with crashed thread, if interested.

    Process:         SophosWebIntelligence [166]
    Path:            /Library/Sophos Anti-Virus/SophosWebIntelligence.bundle/Contents/MacOS/SophosWebIntelligence
    Identifier:      SophosWebIntelligence
    Version:         9.5.0 (???)
    Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
    Parent Process:  launchd [1]
    User ID:         504

    Date/Time:       2016-07-07 12:36:46.761 -0400
    OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.8.5 (12F2560)
    Report Version:  10

    Crashed Thread:  2  Dispatch queue: com.sophos.proxyQueue

    Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
    Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

    Application Specific Information:
    pure virtual method called
    abort() called

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