Is anyone aware of issues with the Sophos system extension causing issues with connectivity while on VPN

Question

I didn&rsquo;t see this in the list of known issues, so I wanted to see if anyone else has come across this. Recently , we have begun deploying the EAP client to a small number of machines to start our BigSur upgrade testing. After upgrading the agent and OS to BigSur the sophos system extension looks to be conflicting with the Cisco Anyconnect sys extension. We are seeing problems with internet connectivity, reaching streaming services etc while connected to the VPN. Removing the Sophos agen Just wanted to see if anyone else has had a similar issue or if this is something Sophos is aware of.

David Lancaster · Answer

Hi Michael Callahan , 
 Thanks for the feedback and apologies about the difficulties you're having. 
 
 We are aware of the issue, unfortunately it's an incompatibility between between 2 Apple APIs that the products are using (NEFilterDataProvider and NETransparentProxyProvider). This has been seen to affect websockets implemented using NSStream or CFStream, so far we have seen that this can affect Safari but Chrome appears to be unaffected. Other apps that implement websockets in similar ways may also encounter the issue. 
 We have providing feedback to Apple and other developers have reported the issue to Apple too. 
 
 In the meantime we can suggest trying a temporary workaround of disabling the features that rely on the network extension. This will leave file based protections in place.

In the central amend, or create new, policies to disable: 
 
 Threat Protection

Real-time Scanning - Internet 
 
 Scan downloads in progress 
 Block access to malicious websites

Remediation
 
 Enable threat case creation 
 Protect network traffic

Web Control
 
 Disable Web Control

Once the features are disabled rebooting the machine will ensure the network extension is not loaded. 
 Give that a try and let us know how you get on.

Is anyone aware of issues with the Sophos system extension causing issues with connectivity while on VPN

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