Sophos Mac Catalina

The latest operating system from Apple, macOS11 Big Sur, has arrived and it brings with it a few significant architecture modifications. In this article, we will take a look at these changes, as well as some of the things you might consider doing to automate much of the deployment of Intercept X on macOS.

1. Sophos Mac Os Catalina
2. Sophos For Mac Catalina
3. Sophos Free For Mac
4. Sophos Home Mac Catalina

After you uninstall Sophos Anti-Virus, the Scan with Sophos Anti-Virus command is still present in a Finder shortcut menu. It disappears when you log in to your Mac again. In Sophos Enterprise Console and Sophos Control Center, you can set up email alerting for Virus alerts, Scanning errors or Other errors. Resolved an issue with Sophos Central Encryption failing to send the recovery key to Sophos Central. MACDP-462: Resolved an issue in which the recovery key was missing after upgrading to macOS High Sierra. MACDP-726: Resolved an issue with SophosEncryptionD not handling the unexpected output of diskutil information. The current test Sophos Endpoint 9.9 for MacOS Catalina (204305) from September 2020 of AV-TEST, the leading international and independent service provider for antivirus software and malware. MacOS 10.15 Catalina and above How to add Security Permissions For a new installation of Sophos on a Mac, Sophos needs to be allowed in the General tab of the Security & Privacy window. Norton is one of those. I wouldn't install Sophos either. Malwarebytes was developed by a long time contributor here; it is mostly to get rid of malware and adware. Mac OS Catalina has excellent protection built in; in fact, the system/OS is now contained in a read-only volume which means no one can gain access to do any harm.

These changes started to appear with macOS Catalina (10.15) – Apple is beginning to deprecate the use of system wide kernel extensions in favour of user space system extension APIs. This allows software like network extensions and endpoint security solutions to extend the functionality of macOS without requiring kernel-level access.

An interesting third party review of some of the most significant changes in the last decade Apple have recently introduced can be found here.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a GA version of Intercept X for Mac available on the first day of release. The good news is that we now have an Early Access Program (EAP) available in Central, whereby customers can nroll devices running macOS11 in order to receive a pre-release version of Sophos Endpoint v10.0.2.

TIP: As you can appreciate, we don’t typically recommend using EAP (pre-release) software on a production system. If you would like to prevent users from upgrading to BigSur AND if you or your customer are using Sophos Endpoint, then it’s worth noting that the SophosLabs have added an Application Control detection for the Big Sur installer. This means that you can control its rollout by blocking the application – the installer is classified as a “System Tool”.

Most of you are probably aware of the process on how to join an EAP and then enroll devices, however if you would like some info on this process click here. Typically, we don’t make EAPs available to Sophos Central MSP accounts, however given that some customers may be purchasing new Apple hardware that comes pre-shipped running Big Sur, we have extended the EAP to MSP customers too.

About new hardware, the following Macintosh models (at the time of writing) use the new Apple M1 ARM-based system chipset:

• MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
• Mac mini (M1, 2020)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)

Sophos Intercept X for Mac does not natively support this new chipset; however, it can be made to work using a piece of backwards compatibility software called Rosetta 2. This software needs to be installed on the Mac before joining it to the EAP and it updating to 10.0.2. More info on this process is also covered in the EAP community post above.

Sophos Mac Os Catalina

On testing the deployment of Intercept X on a brand new macOS11 device, I found the installation routine quite user intensive with several prompts required to allow permissions etc. before a complete protected state could be achieved.

There are several things that can be done to reduce these prompts, specifically using an MDM provider (such as Sophos Mobile or JAMF) to essentially pre-trust extensions using the Sophos ‘Teams ID’ of 2H5GFH3774. This is a trusted ID that is used in the development of Sophos code, to automatically whitelist our software:

I found that this configuration made the deployment of Intercept X for Mac on macOS Catalina and older, virtually ‘silent’. There were still some prompts that required user interaction when deploying on Big Sur, however this will still down on the amount of interaction required without any applied MDM settings.

Our wonderful professional services team have also created a number of scripts to use with JAMF to automate deployment on Macs. Info on this can be found here.

Expect to see some more information in the new year, once a GA version of 10.0.2 for Mac is available, on how to automate the deployment further.

Product Information

macOS Catalina (10.15) was released on October 7, 2019. Technology Support Services will be testing Catalina with our 'standard' software to ensure it is compatible.

PLEASE NOTE that macOS Catalina will not support 32-bit software and may require you to upgrade your software (beyond what is supported by Technology Support Services). Please read How to Determine Which Apps May or May Not Work in macOS Catalinafor more information.

Recommendation

macOS Catalina (10.15) is supported by Academic Technology / Technology Support Services.

If you have OS X 10.12 (Sierra) or an older version, we strongly ​recommend that you upgrade to at least macOS 10.13 (High Sierra). Apple is no longer supporting OS X 10.12 (Sierra).

You will need one of the following models in order to run macOS Catalina:

Sophos For Mac Catalina

• Macbook (2015 or newer)
• MacBook Air (2012 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (2012 or newer)
• Mac mini (2012 or newer)
• iMac (2012 or newer)
• iMac Pro (2017 or newer)

Recommended minimum hardware:

• 20 GB of free space
• 4 GB minimum memory

Please read How to Determine Which Apps May or May Not Work in macOS Catalinafor more information.

Sophos Free For Mac

Sophos Home Mac Catalina

Last Updated 1/9/2020