Sophos has announced an update to its Sophos Firewall, now including Sophos NDR Essential, which is free for all customers with an XStream Protection license for Sophos Firewall.
With this integration, Sophos Firewall leverages two dedicated artificial intelligence engines to detect malware communications and communications using algorithmically generated domain names.
This new feature, stemming from the Sophos Network Detection and Response probe, aims to identify malware communications even when they are previously unknown or not yet indexed.
It complements the Active Threat Response capabilities already implemented in Sophos firewalls.
According to Chris McCormack, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sophos, “NDR traffic analysis requires substantial processing power. That’s why we’ve adopted a new approach by deploying an NDR solution in Sophos Cloud to offload the heaviest tasks from the firewall.”
Sophos Connect now integrates EntraID for SSO.
This new feature of the VPN client bundled with Sophos Firewall enhances both security and user experience for SSL and IPSEC VPN connections. It is now possible to use EntraID (Azure
- AD) to authenticate users and implement multi-factor authentication for Sophos Connect and access to the user portal hosted by the firewall.
Other VPN-related improvements include:
- Improved user interface and usability: Connection types have been renamed from “site-to- site” to “policy-based”, and tunnel interfaces have been renamed “route-based” to make them more intuitive.
- Dynamic validation of the IP address pool allocated to VPN connections (SSL VPN, IPsec, L2TP, and PPTP) to better resolve potential IP address conflicts.
- Strict profile enforcement: In IPsec profiles, default values are now excluded to ensure algorithm synchronization, thereby eliminating possible fragmentation of session negotiation packets that could otherwise prevent site-to-site VPN tunnels from being established.
- Route-based VPN and SD-RED scalability: The system now supports up to 3,000 simultaneously established tunnels. Sophos Firewall solutions can now handle up to 1,000 SD-RED site-to-site tunnels and up to 650 concurrent SD-RED devices.