Sophos Central Update – Email Impersonation Protection and more
Sophos has introduced a few interesting innovations over the last few weeks, of which I would like to briefly summarize the most important from my point of view.
Email Impersonation Protection
Sophos Central Email Advanced gets a new feature to better handle phishing attacks. The new feature, called Email Impersonation Protection, is designed to help detect and block emails from impersonators.
In this scam, attackers send you emails with the name of a trustworthy sender in order to deceive you deceitfully. The sender can be, for example, the name of your boss, a colleague or your bank.
For an untrained eye, it is incredibly difficult to detect such fraudulent emails independently. Sophos even cites a new study on your site that found 43% of SMBs were affected by identity fraud phishing attacks last year.
Info: Email Impersonation Protection was rolled out globally on January 14, 2020 and is available immediately to all users with an Email Advanced license.
Sophos Wireless – social login and hotspot customizations
The latest Central Wireless release brings two frequently requested features to enhance the Captive Portal.
Social Login with Google and Facebook
If you activate the hotspot for your SSID under the Captive Portal item, the Social Logins option is now available for authentication. You can choose between Google and Facebook. However, by enabling this feature, you still need to make some settings in the Google or Facebook account. The setup is not that easy and Sophos has provided a video tutorial here, at least once for the Facebook variant.
Hotspot adjustments
Also on the Captive Portal page, there is a new drop-down menu that allows you to select a template: Standard or Custom. If you now select “custom”, a dialog box will appear where you can upload an image/logo (max. size 1 MB). It is also possible to choose your own background color. Then, as soon as a user connects to the hotspot’s SSID, they will be redirected to your customized page.
Sophos Managed Threat Response now available for clients and servers!
When I wrote the blogpost about MTR at the end of November, support was only offered for Windows Endpoint 32 and 64 bit at that time. MacOS (10.13+) and Windows Server (2008 R2+) are now also added.
Info: You will find the products for MTR on our website next week at the latest!
Sophos Mobile 9.5 now also rolled out for Central
I already presented the new features of Sophos Mobile 9.5 at the beginning of December 2019: Sophos Mobile 9.5: web filtering for Chromebooks and more. At that time, these features were only available for the on premises variant. Somewhat belatedly, Sophos has now released the update over the weekend from the 11. and January 12 also rolled out for all Central customers. 🥳
More flexibility with custom roles
Until now, you could create your own roles in Central Admin in addition to the predefined roles. This made it possible, for example, to give an admin permissions only for a specific module in Central. The latest update now adds even more flexibility to custom roles. Completely independent of the base roles, you can adjust the following settings individually:
- Access to logs & reports
- Policy management (add, edit, delete)
- Policy assignment to users, devices, etc.
Cloud Optix now available in Sophos Central
Sophos introduced the Cloud Optix product in April 2019. Until now, it was never a product that we necessarily wanted to offer via our website. Somehow, the spark has not been ignited until today and there has simply been a lack of time and interest to take a closer look at Cloud Optix.
However, with the latest release of Sophos Cloud Optix, the product has now been fully integrated into Central. Until now, it was linked in the navigation, but the management was always on a separate web page, which also required an additional login.
