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

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.

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

Sascha, you’re response sounds like a recent graduate with a CS degree, with little understanding of the larger context in which software serves. Branding is a form of communication. Wasting the time of so many people is what the other members are complaining about, yet you ignore the basic premise of the complaint. Your response talks to the term branding as if they’re talking about brand market dominance (which is not what they are requesting), rather than simply recognition of the product as part of Sophos. So arguing against whether money is put to branding as advertising ignores the actual and legitimate request. Your answer is called a strawman argument. In fact, #2 & #3 have a similar problem where you respond to something that is not directly an issue, so those too can be considered strawman arguments and rather ineffectual. #4 is really just a repeat of #1. Perhaps I was just annoyed by your attitude and blindness in answering #1. You come off as an employee that has very little concern for the customers, and self-serving rather than helpful. That may not be true, but your lead-in really sets the tone.

I can understand the frustration with software branding, as an IT professional you can waster a lot of time navigating in the in's and out's of how a new software package works, why are things not done in a more organized fashion to make our jobs a little easier.

But I am amazed at how many people complain about things that would not have happened if they would have stuck to standard practices in the IT world.

For example this should never happen in the first place, when vetting software any software, there is not a college in the world for IT administration the does not teach to test software and or any changes prior to putting those changes into a production environment.  IT admins should be installing the software on a new test system with known services and applications and compare the changes after the software is installed, this should be done before it is even purchased.  Sophos offers a free 30 day trial so no one should really be surprised after the fact about anything.  

Also,  

This part I have to assume a little but it still stands some reasoning-

Which is, the re-branding aspect might not be possible based on the purchase agreement Sophos may have with Hitman Pro.  That agreement may also be renewed every few years with the intention to re-brand but Hitman Pro might not want that and it could be a deal breaker in the negation. 

BadRobot, very good points (From last year.) I got pulled back into this when I was notified that my ID was expiring. To my amazement, this discussion is still relevant since they haven't fixed this issue. I agree wholeheartedly that basic practices may have been the cause. To your second point, I think that's a good guess as to why they choose not to fix such an annoying issue, either in negotiating such a purchase or simply not fixing it. This still points to how they have a total disregard for the general concept of naming for the sake of usability, and thus less frustration for end users. The continued cavelier attitude and lack of change indicates a lack of awareness possibly due to insular thinking which plagues the tech community. 

BadRobot, very good points (From last year.) I got pulled back into this when I was notified that my ID was expiring. To my amazement, this discussion is still relevant since they haven't fixed this issue. I agree wholeheartedly that basic practices may have been the cause. To your second point, I think that's a good guess as to why they choose not to fix such an annoying issue, either in negotiating such a purchase or simply not fixing it. This still points to how they have a total disregard for the general concept of naming for the sake of usability, and thus less frustration for end users. The continued cavelier attitude and lack of change indicates a lack of awareness possibly due to insular thinking which plagues the tech community.