Sophos Endpoint 10 eases policy, threat and risk management

IT security and data protection company, Sophos, has announced the latest version of its endpoint security solution, Sophos Endpoint 10.

The solution includes Sophos Patch Assessment, which identifies, prioritises and scans for critical threat-related security patches to ensure that IT departments know which threats a patch prevents, from the most critical to the least critical. Sophos Patch Assessment also enables scanning for Microsoft and third-party patches from vendors such as Adobe, Apple, Citrix, Microsoft, Skype and others.

“According to industry estimates, as many as 90% of successful attacks are against vulnerabilities in which a patch already exists. Despite this statistic, many computers do not have the latest security patches installed, putting organisations at serious risk from a variety of malware threats,” says Brett Myroff, CEO of Sophos distributor, NetXactics.

“Patches are time-consuming to track and administer, and it is often difficult to see which computers actually have critical patches installed correctly. Without this visibility, IT managers have no simple method of identifying computers most at risk,” he says.

Sophos Web Filtering further makes it easy to set a smart surfing policy for the top 14 most inappropriate site categories from within the Endpoint Enterprise Console. Users are protected from these sites wherever they go, with no additional software or infrastructure required. Sophos Web Filtering also enables better performance for users, as scanning is done locally, not back to a box in the data centre, thereby reducing the number of boxes needed to manage Web usage.

“Security vendors are now combining reputation-based data with URL filtering to stop users from accessing sites known to be infected, or sites that repeatedly host malware or other unwanted content,” Myroff says. “Reputation-based URL filtering that performs real-time lookups against the security vendor's database is especially effective at blocking the thousands of new malware sites, search engine optimisation (SEO) poisoning attacks and hijacked trusted sites that pop up daily.”

Full-disk encryption in Sophos Endpoint ensures that data stored on desktops and laptops is kept secure, enabling IT staff to encrypt workstations and see their status. Moreover, Sophos encryption is integrated into the latest version of Sophos Endpoint, without a separate deployment or console required. This makes it faster and easier to install full-disk encryption on computers.

“Sophos's goal has always been to provide customers with complete security and protection, without complexity. The features within Sophos Endpoint 10 reaffirm that goal. It is the result of a close collaboration with customers and partners, and offers improved performance, client-side Web protection, patch identification and prioritisation, as well as integrated disk encryption management,” Myroff concludes.