Sophos earns three AAA awards in SE Labs' security test

Sophos, a global specialist in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, has announced that Sophos' Intercept X endpoint security detected and stopped commodity, real-world cyber attacks and simulated targeted attacks with 100% accuracy in SE Labs' enterprise, small and medium-sized business and consumer tests.

Sophos earned three AAA awards for having perfect scores in every test conducted, including blocking malicious URLs, handling exploits and correctly classifying legitimate applications and websites.

Simon Reed, Senior Vice President of SophosLabs, says, "SE Labs is one of the few security testers in the industry that simulates modern-day attack tools and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that cyber criminals and pentesters are actively using, and this includes malware and targeted threats that Sophos consistently defeated early in the attack chain with 100% accuracy.

"As a result, Sophos won all three of SE Labs' AAA awards, further solidifying its leadership position as an endpoint provider. These top award wins showcase our ability to stop complex attacks that use a variety and combination of techniques, tools and objectives."

SE Labs also tested products, including Sophos Intercept X, for later-stage defence capabilities like behavioural, memory and anti-malware scan interface (AMSI) detections, as well as protections against "impact on objectives" behaviour, such as ransomware file encryption.

Reed says, "Sophos' cybersecurity strategy is to deliver multiple layers of protection to defend against the many different threat vectors that attackers use to escalate and carry out an attack.

"The SE Labs tests prove we stop attacks at the earliest point, but it's also important for endpoint solutions, like Sophos Intercept X, to have multiple layers of protection within a single product solution."

Simon Edwards, CEO of SE Labs, says, "It is essential for organisations to be able to rely on credible, full attack chain tests that duplicate real-world scenarios. It is not only about throwing a wider range of attacks at the products, but each step of the attack must be realistic too. You can't just make up what you think attackers are doing and hope you're right.

"This is why SE Labs tracks cyber criminal behaviours and builds tests based on how attackers try to compromise victims. With its 100% accuracy, Sophos validated that its endpoint security works. Intercept X stopped everything in our tests."

Sophos also provides detections optimised for security operations experts who are trained to identify, investigate and respond to attack attempts. These detections could be red flags signalling a new or ongoing intrusion or signs of attackers returning to try again. Either way, attackers are persistent and unpredictable, as evidenced in ongoing threat intelligence from Sophos X-Ops.

Sophos' endpoint offerings include Sophos Intercept X and Sophos XDR (extended detection and response), which combine anti-ransomware technology, deep learning artificial intelligence, exploit prevention, and active adversary mitigations to stop attacks.

Offerings are managed in the cloud-native Sophos Central platform or by Sophos Managed Detection and Response, a 24/7 managed detection and response (MDR) service used by more than 13,500 organisations.