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Uninstalling Sophos Endpoint

John Lockwood2

Sophos do provide an official Uninstall/Remove tool for uninstalling Sophos EndPoint on a Mac.

This used to work fine on Macs but with macOS Big Sur (and Monterey) Apple have again moved the goal posts and this results in the System Extensions being left behind and still active. 

For Big Sur and Monterey there are now three possible solutions.

  1. The 'Apple way' - the end user themselves is an admin and has total control over their laptop, they are geniuses and know exactly what to do which is to drag /Applications/Sophos/Sophos Network Extension.app to the bin, and to also drag /Applications/Sophos/Sophos Scan.app/Contents/MacOS/SophosScanD.app which is hidden inside the Sophos Scan.app also to the bin (This triggers an Apple dialog asking the user to confirm uninstalling the system extensions included in these two 'apps')
  2. Reboot to Recovery mode, turn off SIP, reboot, remove the system extensions using systemextensionsctl -uninstall reboot again turn SIP back on. (Note: If you have a Mac running macOS Catalina or earlier then it is not necessary to turn off SIP.)
  3. Use a new function Apple added to macOS Monterey and I believe Big Sur 11.6 which allows turning off the need to supply via a local user an admin authorisation as a result option 1 should no longer be necessary and it should be possible to automate the process

Clearly option 3 looks more suitable for an Enterprise environment.

Unfortunately, option 3 not only needs a very recent version of macOS but it also requires the developer of the system extensions - in this case obviously Sophos to write support for this new capability in to their own built-in uninstaller. I strongly suspect Sophos have not yet done this.

The following two articles provide excellent background to these issues - which I have seen discussed in the Big Sur EAP forum but to which I cannot post.

https://grahamrpugh.com/2021/04/06/delete-system-extension-command-line.html

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/silently-uninstalling-system-extensions-on-macos-monterey-and-earlier/?unapproved=65452&moderation-hash=1a29c0df9667f4dce173d7736088417f#comment-65452 

The second link above also has links to some of the official Apple developer documentation on how to implement this function in the developers uninstaller. Sophos therefore should look at those links as well.

It should be noted that apparently Microsoft have added this capability to their own Microsoft Defender uninstaller.



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  • 0

    Hello John,

    Thank you for reaching out to the Sophos Community. 

    I have relayed this information to our internal teams. I will follow up on this thread as more information on future development becomes available. 

    Kushal Lakhan
    Team Lead, Global Community Support
    Connect with Sophos Support, get alerted, and be informed.
    If a post solves your question, please use the "Verify Answer" button.
    The New Home of Sophos Support Videos!  - Visit Sophos Techvids
  • +1 in reply to Qoosh

    Hello John,

    Thank you these sharing these informative links. I have passed along this information to our internal teams, who have mentioned that this is something they are looking into for future development cycles. Our team is consistently working on addressing improvements for macOS.

    Thank you once again for your feedback.

    Kushal Lakhan
    Team Lead, Global Community Support
    Connect with Sophos Support, get alerted, and be informed.
    If a post solves your question, please use the "Verify Answer" button.
    The New Home of Sophos Support Videos!  - Visit Sophos Techvids
  • 0 in reply to Qoosh

    Hi Kushal, thanks for your previous interaction. 
    Is there any update on this? The product just doesn't uninstall and I can't recommend the product to my company anymore until it's fixed.

  • 0 in reply to cbae

    Here is what we found and currently do.

    1. A normal Mac following the normal process as per Sophos' own article of dragging app bundles to the Bin successfully uninstalls one of the two System Extensions but not the other. My suspicion is that macOS is 'confused' by the second one being embedded in an app which is itself embedded inside another app. All the proper macOS messages are shown but this one does not properly uninstall.

    2. I did try writing a shell script which used AppleScript to tell the Finder to 'drag' the apps to the Bin. This works on a Mac that is not enrolled in Jamf Pro but fails on Macs enrolled in to Jamf Pro even though I have correctly told Jamf Pro PPPC to allow this. Jamf say this is a bug in both macOS Big Sur and Monterey.

    3. Sophos do not yet support the new Apple API to fully automate uninstalling System Extensions. The impression I got from their response was that until I brought this to their attention they were not aware of this at all.

    4. We currently successfully do the uninstall including System Extensions by a) turning SIP off, b) removing the first app and hence extension, c) rebooting, then d) removing the second one and e) rebooting and then running the Sophos uninstaller, then f) turning SIP back on. We have to get users to manually turn SIP off and on but the rest we have automated via two Jamf Self Service 'apps'.

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  • 0 in reply to cbae

    Here is what we found and currently do.

    1. A normal Mac following the normal process as per Sophos' own article of dragging app bundles to the Bin successfully uninstalls one of the two System Extensions but not the other. My suspicion is that macOS is 'confused' by the second one being embedded in an app which is itself embedded inside another app. All the proper macOS messages are shown but this one does not properly uninstall.

    2. I did try writing a shell script which used AppleScript to tell the Finder to 'drag' the apps to the Bin. This works on a Mac that is not enrolled in Jamf Pro but fails on Macs enrolled in to Jamf Pro even though I have correctly told Jamf Pro PPPC to allow this. Jamf say this is a bug in both macOS Big Sur and Monterey.

    3. Sophos do not yet support the new Apple API to fully automate uninstalling System Extensions. The impression I got from their response was that until I brought this to their attention they were not aware of this at all.

    4. We currently successfully do the uninstall including System Extensions by a) turning SIP off, b) removing the first app and hence extension, c) rebooting, then d) removing the second one and e) rebooting and then running the Sophos uninstaller, then f) turning SIP back on. We have to get users to manually turn SIP off and on but the rest we have automated via two Jamf Self Service 'apps'.

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