Sophos Live Protection

Sophos Live Protection uses in-the-cloud technology to instantly decide whether a suspicious file is a threat and take action specified in the anti-virus and HIPS policy.

Live Protection improves detection of new malware without the risk of unwanted detections. This is achieved by doing an instant lookup against the very latest known malicious files. When new malware is identified, Sophos can send out updates within seconds.

To take full advantage of Live Protection, you must ensure that the following options are enabled.

• Enable Live Protection

  If on-access scanning on an endpoint computer has identified a file as suspicious, but cannot further identify it as either clean or malicious based on the threat identity (IDE) files stored on the computer, certain file characteristics such as checksum are sent to Sophos to assist with further analysis. The in-the-cloud checking performs an instant lookup of a suspicious file in the SophosLabs database. If the file is identified as clean or malicious, the decision is sent back to the computer and the status of the file is automatically updated.

  Important: The Malicious Traffic Detection and Download Reputation features require Live Protection to be enabled in order to perform instant lookups in the SophosLabs online database and obtain the latest threat or reputation data.
• Enable Live Protection for on-demand scanning

  If you want on-demand scans to use the same in-the-cloud checking as on-access scanning, select this option.

• Automatically send file samples to Sophos

  If a file is deemed potentially malicious but cannot be positively identified as malicious based on its characteristics alone, Live Protection allows Sophos to request a sample of the file. When Live Protection is enabled, if this option is enabled and Sophos does not already hold a sample of the file, the file is submitted automatically.

  Submission of such sample files helps Sophos to continuously enhance detection of malware without the risk of false positives.

  Note: The maximum sample size is 10 MB. The timeout for sample upload is 30 seconds. It is not recommended to automatically send samples over a slow connection (less than 56 Kbps).