Sophos Central Update – Email Impersonation Protection and More
Over the last few weeks, Sophos has introduced a number of interesting new features. I have summarised the most important ones for you below.
Email Impersonation Protection
Sophos Central Email Advanced receives a new capability to detect and stop phishing attacks even more effectively. The new Email Impersonation Protection component helps identify and block emails sent by imposters.
In this type of fraud, attackers send emails that appear to come from a trusted person in order to trick you specifically. The display name might be the managing director, a colleague, or a bank.
For less experienced users it is extremely difficult to reliably spot such fraudulent messages. Sophos refers to a recent study indicating that 43% of SMEs were affected by phishing attacks with identity spoofing last year.
Info: Email Impersonation Protection was rolled out globally on 14 January 2020 and is now available to all users with an Email Advanced licence.
Sophos Wireless – social login and hotspot customisation
The latest Central Wireless release brings two often‑requested enhancements for the captive portal.
Social login with Google and Facebook
If you enable a hotspot for your SSID under Captive Portal, you now have the option of using Social Logins for authentication. You can choose between Google and Facebook. After enabling the feature, you still need to complete a few settings in your Google or Facebook account. The configuration is not entirely trivial – Sophos has already published a video guide for the Facebook variant.
Hotspot customisation
Also on the Captive Portal page you will now find a new dropdown menu where you can choose a template: Standard or Custom. If you select “Custom”, a dialogue opens in which you can upload an image or logo (maximum size 1 MB). You can also define your own background colour. When a user then connects to the hotspot SSID, they are redirected to your individually branded login page.
Sophos Managed Threat Response now available for endpoints and servers
When I wrote the blog post about MTR at the end of November, the service was only available for Windows Endpoint (32‑ and 64‑bit). In the meantime, support has been extended to macOS (from version 10.13) and Windows Server (from 2008 R2).
Info: You will see the MTR products on our website by next week at the latest.
Sophos Mobile 9.5 now also available in Central
I already introduced the new features in Sophos Mobile 9.5 at the beginning of December 2019: Sophos Mobile 9.5: Web Filtering for Chromebooks and much more At that time, the features were only available in the on‑premises variant. Sophos has now rolled out the update for all Central customers over the weekend of 11 and 12 January. 🥳
More flexibility for custom roles
In Central Admin you could already create your own roles in addition to the predefined ones. This made it possible, for example, to assign administrators permissions for a specific module in Central. The latest update significantly extends what these custom roles can do. Independent of the base roles, you can now control, among other things, the following permissions separately:
- Access to logs and reports
- Policy management (add, edit, delete)
- Assignment of policies to users, devices, and so on
Cloud Optix now integrated into Sophos Central
Sophos introduced Cloud Optix in April 2019. Up to now it has not been a focus product on our website – it had not quite caught on yet, and we lacked the time and focus for a deeper dive.
With the current release, Cloud Optix is now fully integrated into Sophos Central. Previously, it was only linked via a navigation item; actual management took place on a separate website with its own login.
