Why is the Hitmanpro service installed and used when it is Sophos Intercept?

Question

I understand it is Hitmanpro's software, but why does it show as Hitmanpro and not a rebranded Sophos name? It would make sense to keep all the services together. Was this intentional?

Rincewind · Accepted Answer

We will get around to the branding in the future. Our initial focus is on making the features from HitmanPro available to Sophos Central customers as part of Intercept X

Bushy555 · Answer

T H I S !!!! 
 This is the exact thing that PISSES off customers to no end from ALL software companies. 
 Nearly TWO Years ago you stated below, yeah, we might try and rebrand the hitman name. Here it is 2018 and nothin' has changed. 
 I thought hitman was bloody malware crap and spent the better half of the day trying to rid the bloody thing off our servers but, of course, couldnt. 
 It wasnt until just now upon doing a google search that Ive learnt it is part of Sophos. 
 1) We pay thousands of good dollars every year for a software product, and get re-branded stuff that we never knew about running in the background. We were never told about it. Sophos should be advertising this; forcing this down our throats upon installs or emails or something. Pushed out. Not end users having to google for it!! 
 2) Hitman has been hitting our cpu's hard , as in, 100% for days. Why is the product so crappily written? Pure bloatware and poor sharing of resources. 
 3) As admin I want to be in control of my hardware and software. Why lock it down so much that I need a 3 year software engineering course in order to unlock / uninstall your totally-locked up software? Sure , it needs to be locked up and secure, but I think that Sophos has totally gone too far overboard and has lost the plot for simple administration. 
 4) Change the bloody name on that dreadfully written software already. 
 
 /cheesed-off admin user whom has had too much coffee.

SaschaParis · Answer

Hi Bushy 
 Short answers: 
 1) You finally (or hopefully) don't pay your dollars for "branding". Maybe in some cases for a "brand". Usually you're paying for the protection capabilities to keep malicious crap away to protect the crown jewels of a company. I do not know the technical or other reasons for not rebranding it until now, but 99% of Sophos partners selling Intercept x are usually aware that hitman process belongs to Intercept. 
 2) Jup. I have seen this a few times too over time. Especially on low end machines, or slow HDDs, and often also due third party apps heavily scraping around on HDD (Dropbox, Onedrive, CCLEANER boottime auto cleanup, additional Anti Spyware Installations as Spybot etc.) and giving hitman (and AV too) a hard time to keep up. On halfway state of the Art machines Boot and Login are still slowed down, but daily working afterwards is perfectly fluid. I personally prefer protection over fast boot and login times, as I boot and log in only once or twice a day, but work for hours on my device(s). 
 3) That comfort can be achieved by simply disabling tamper protection. That same comfort (disabling tamper protection) also opens door for some malwares to disable AV and do bad stuff afterwards There's a reason that this (in earlier times not avaiable) tamper protection feature got demanded for years by enterprise and higly security affine cutomers. If it's hard to tamper Sophos AV with tamper protection on, I'd take this as credit to the devs, that they implemented it right. 
 4) +1 from me. I'd like to see it renamed in future too. However, I peronally mainly need the protection capabilities and give not too much on how the processes are called, I only need to know which ones belong to a Sophos installation and what their function is ;o) 
 BTW concerning your hitman removal attempt: A google search might have given you a quick answer too. But tbh as I"m a man too, I'm not better. I usually also try to handle things first by myself, RTFM is the last option