Sophos Endpoint Protection: EDR, EPP, and XDR Explained

What Does Sophos Endpoint Protection Do?

Sophos endpoint protection offers threat detection and response capabilities. It provides visibility into suspicious activity across the organization, helps prioritize remediation, and automates response.

Key features

Sophos Endpoint Protection is an endpoint protection product that includes:

• Advanced anti-malware
• Website browsing protection and filtering
• Application control
• Device control
• Data loss prevention (DLP)
• Client firewall
• Application and device control
• Host-based intrusion prevention system (IPS)
• Email protection including anti-spam and anti-phishing
• Patch management
• Mobile device management (MDM), including anti-theft, inventory management, and policy enforcement
• Mobile applications control and email management on mobile devices

Sophos Endpoint Solution Architecture

Sophos Endpoint Protection requires administrators to install Sophos Enterprise Console on a server in their on-premise data center, to simplify deployment and installation of clients on all endpoints. The client functions both as an agent that communicates with the Console, but is also a standalone endpoint protection solution for remote endpoints.

The Enterprise Console supports policy creation and deployment, provides endpoint status information and events, and enables remote endpoint remediation. Administrators can also use it to manage endpoint protection clients over the web.

In addition, the solution includes a Secure Email Gateway, which performs anti-spam and antivirus, DLP, email encryption, and full disk encryption for Microsoft Exchange. The Gateway also enables web application control and advanced web filtering.

Platform support

Symantec Endpoint Protection supports most versions of Windows desktop through Windows 10, Windows Server 2003, 2012 R2, Microsoft Exchange, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems.

Supported mobile operating systems include Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry OS. Virtual environment support includes VMware vSphere, ESX and workstations, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V servers.

Related content: Read our guide to endpoint protection platforms

Sophos Intercept X Endpoint

Intercept X Endpoint is an endpoint security software product that incorporates advanced features like deep learning analysis, anti-ransomware, and fileless attack protection, to protect against advanced forms of malware. The solution comes in three editions:

• Intercept X Advanced —includes basic endpoint protection features like Sophos Endpoint Protection and next-generation malware protection.

• Intercept X Advanced with XDR —includes the above and in addition, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and extended detection and response (XDR) .
• Intercept X Advanced with MDR Complete: 24/7 managed services for threat detection and response.
• Pricing for each package is customized and available upon contacting the vendor. Pricing is per user.

Sophos also provides managed detection and response (MDR) . This means Sophos security experts can actively manage the device to discover threats in the environment and respond to them.

According to the Sophos website, Intercept X Advanced with XDR.

Intercept X integrates with the cloud-based Sophos Central platform, enabling management of Intercept X together with other Sophos products. All editions support Windows 7 or later or macOS.

Below we provide more information about the additional capabilities offered by Intercept X Advanced and Intercept X Advanced with XDR.

Sophos EDR and XDR

What are Sophos Endpoint EDR Features?

Sophos provides threat detection and response capabilities across devices and servers. Features include:

• Visibility into IT security posture
• SQL querying or pre-built queries
• Ability to run commands to terminate processes and reboot devices
• Threat prioritization
• Automated case creation and case management tools
• Mapping to MITRE ATT&CK
• Automated process termination, ransomware rollback, and network isolation
• Support for multiple OSs

What are the Benefits of Sophos Endpoint EDR?

Sophos Endpoint EDR enables organizations to proactively detect threats and reduce investigation time for better incident response. It’s also considered a solution that is efficient to deploy and manage. 

What are Sophos XDR Features?

Sophos XDR builds on EDR capabilities and extends them across more attack surfaces. XDR is available as a native version, with Sophos’s products, or in hybrid mode, integrating with the customer’s products.

Features include:

• Visibility across IT surfaces
• Threat investigation
• Threat containment
• GenAI threat detection support: summaries, analysis, and searches

What are the Benefits of Sophos XDR?

Sophos XDR provides deeper visibility and faster response across the entire attack surface. It also enhances threat detection with AI. This enables security teams to detect and mitigate threats more effectively and efficiently.

Deep Learning Technology

Intercept X integrates deep learning (neural networks) to make endpoint security predictive, protecting against known as well as unknown threats. Deep learning analysis can potentially outperform other machine learning algorithms in detecting unknown malware.

Anti-Ransomware

Today’s ransomware attacks typically combine a variety of advanced adversarial techniques. Advanced ransomware protection is required to identify the entire attack chain, minimizing the risk of an effective attack. Symantec Intercept X provides protection against multiple steps of the ransomware attack chain, leveraging deep learning to detect attacks in their early stages, and CryptoGuard technology to potentially roll back malicious file encryption.

Exploit Prevention

Sophos exploit prevention is designed to block advanced attack techniques such as fileless, malware-free, and attacks that exploit vulnerabilities. In any given attack chain, only a handful of exploits are used by attackers, and detecting them is the key to effective response. Exploit prevention can identify the specific exploit toolkits used by attackers and block them, stopping zero day attacks in their tracks.

Active Adversary Mitigations

Sophos provides targeted protection against common attack technologies used by attackers to gain a hold in a corporate environment—including credential theft and code caves. This capability is focused on non-malware techniques attackers use to compromise accounts and perform lateral movement. By detecting and blocking these behaviors, it adds another layer of protection against sophisticated attacks.

Central Management

Sophos Sophos Central is a cloud-based management platform that centralizes all Sophos solutions. It lets security teams create and deploy strategies, investigate potential threats, manage assets, view install locations, and deploy clients, from a single interface.

Synchronized Security

Intercept X integrates other Sophos solutions to provide collaboration between tools. For example, Intercept X and Sophos Firewall can work together to identify, quarantine, and remediate infected devices. Intercept X can check to ensure the threat was removed and validate there is no longer any risk of lateral movement, and the firewall restores network connectivity. This can often be done automatically, without administrator intervention.

Managed Threat Response

Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR) is a fully managed service that offers 24/7 threat detection and response by Sophos experts for an additional fee. Sophos MTR helps improve threat detection, offers deeper alert analysis, and enables teams to take targeted actions when eliminating threats.

The Sophos MTR team alerts about attacks and suspicious behavior and can also take actions to investigate and eradicate the threat.

Sophos Endpoint Protection Strengths and Limitations

According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection, 2024 , the primary strengths of Sophos Endpoint protection are:

• Strong product roadmap
• Effective sales strategy
• Consistent revenue growth

Gartner also cautions about the following limitations of the solution:

• Few product customization options
• No support for on-premises EPP deployments
• Technical support is inconsistent
• Performance can be impacted during scanning

Endpoint Protection—Prevention, Detection and Protection with Cynet

Cynet is a security solution that includes a complete Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP), with built-in EDR security , a Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV) , and automated incident response. Cynet makes it easier to adopt a modern security toolset by offering an “all-in-one” security model: Cynet All-in-One goes beyond endpoint protection, offering network analytics, UEBA,  and deception technology.

Cynet’s platform includes:

• NGAV —blocks malware, exploits, LOLBins, Macros, malicious scripts, and other known and unknown malicious payloads.
• Zero-day protection —uses User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to detect suspicious activity and block unknown threats.
• Monitoring and control —asset management, endpoint vulnerability assessments and application control, with auditing, logging and monitoring.
• Response orchestration —automated playbooks and remote manual action for remediating endpoints, networks and user accounts affected by an attack.
• Deception technology —lures attackers to a supposedly vulnerable honeypot, mitigating damage and gathering useful intelligence about attack techniques.
• Network analytics— identifying lateral movement, suspicious connections and unusual logins.

Learn more about Cynet’s All-in-One cybersecurity platform.