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back to article Sophos waters down 'NHS is totally protected' by us boast

Sophos updated its website over the weekend to water down claims that it was protecting the NHS from cyber-attacks following last week's catastrophic WannaCrypt outbreak. Proud website boasts that the "NHS is totally protected with Sophos" became "Sophos understands the security needs of the NHS" after the weekend scrub-up. …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    All IT professionals overestimate how well users are familiar with computers and how well they can be trained.

    In many healthcare settings I've seen nurses have notebooks full of:

    "To do X,

    Click lowermost left, click second up third to right",

    going on in for however many steps the custom software needs to perform things. I've wondered why it doesn't have buttons that does the X, Y and Z that the nurses have made their own 27-step lists on how to do through the convoluted interfaces...

    That is the level of user sophistication we need to design for, ladies and gentlemen.

    6 0 Reply
    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
      Reply Icon

      Re: level of user sophistication

      Quite.

      1 0 Reply
  2. mivecboy

    Panda

    Panda Adaptive Defence 360 would have stopped this - we had the wannacrypt file in our signature database and the Advanced Protection in Lock mode would have stopped the unknown processes

    0 5 Reply
    1. Dwarf
      Reply Icon

      Re: Panda

      The register hijacked by sales drones ???

      Perhaps you would substantiate your claim - which version, when was the patch out, how come you knew about if before everyone else etc.

      3 0 Reply
      1. mivecboy
        Reply Icon

        Re: Panda

        Tech drone, not sales drone thank you - Adaptive Defense 360 blocks unknown and unclassified processes regardless of the source, ie malware, shareware, custom application etc, until they are classified as Goodware, so we would have blocked the encrypter software as an unknown process. We've had zero infections with Wannacrypt on AD360 covered machines.

        Also, the product is 5 out of 5 stars recommended in PC Pro this month. You can bash this as a sales pitch but if it saves people losing data or having to pay ransoms then job done.

        0 1 Reply
    2. Random Handle
      Reply Icon

      Re: Panda

      >Panda Adaptive Defence 360

      I'm sure it's a wonderful product - but I've always dismissed it out-of-hand simply because it's called 'Panda' - dodo is about the only animal I can think of which would be a worse choice.

      2 0 Reply
    3. CentralCoasty
      Reply Icon
      Black Helicopters

      Re: Panda

      hummmm... so you knew about it before everyone else.... I see... and you had the patch ready to go.... I see..... so how are your sales figures doing now?... .ohh.... through the roof... I see...... all a very strange coincidence.....

      2 0 Reply
  3. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    NHS can't move some systems.

    Bespoke code for imaging equipment etc. sometimes requires XP. Getting updates for modern OSs is either eye-wateringly expensive, or impossible. Funding to replace the entire kit is unicorn territory.

    0 0 Reply

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. Duffaboy
    FAIL

    Me thinks your average it manager

    Knows nothing about I.T

    1 0 Reply
  5. Duffaboy
    Facepalm

    The problem is with AV scanners is

    The (trojan) horse has already bolted

    0 0 Reply
  6. jason 7

    The last folks I knew that got hit with Ransomeware...

    ...got hit via MS Remote Access. They were all accessing one machine remotely as part time staff. They had like 5 digit passwords (groan).

    0 0 Reply
  7. Robin Bradshaw

    And yet microsoft provide monthly updates that protect you against the newest threats for free! and people wont apply them.

    1 0 Reply
    1. quxinot
      Reply Icon

      Possibly because those same unlabeled patches have inflicted users with advertisements for an OS they don't want, break things that work, and change settings in unwanted ways?

      Stop teaching users that updates are mystical things that with unwanted effects, and they'd likely be more willing to update to improve their security. Trust is in very short supply between users and many large software houses.

      It's almost as if it's being made intentionally worse, so that a subscription cloudy version can be sold. After all, that never goes down or loses data, right?

      Disgusting on all sides.

      2 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lets raise funds for a new anti-virus program that detects backlogs in patches and updates and then switches itself off with the message "You are too stupid to deserve protection, please send 3850 bitcoin to ............ to uninstall Weasel Antivirus"

    0 0 Reply
  9. Christian Berger

    If the statements of Sophos were true...

    ... Alfred Nobel would personally raise from the dead and create a Nobel Prize for Informatics to hand them to them. You cannot determine what a program is doing by looking at it. It's called the halting problem and it was proven long before computers came into widespread use. If Sophoses claims were true, they'd have disproven something that has been mathematically proven over and over again. It's like finding a triangle on a flat surface where the angles don't ad up to 180°.

    And looking at what an already existing program does, obviously doesn't work. First of all, it already had some something bad, secondly, file compresion/archival software looks just like ransomware, if you only look at what is happening at an API level. It's impossible to get a detection which is sharp enough to lower the false positives to something acceptable while still detecting what you want.

    0 1 Reply
    1. Diodelogic
      Reply Icon

      Re: If the statements of Sophos were true...

      @ Christian Berger:

      Your description of the halting problem didn't sound right to me...

      "The halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running or continue to run forever."

      1 0 Reply
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What absolute crap

    Intercept x would have protected them? Just read the first line

    https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/intercept-x/how-to-buy.aspx

    0 0 Reply
  11. Steve Knox
    Joke

    Homeopathy for Computers

    Here. -> 1010 <- Install these bits on your computer. They're a memory dump from an infected PC distilled to 5C, so they should provide adequate immunity.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Naselus
      Reply Icon

      Re: Homeopathy for Computers

      Did you not forget to dilute it with 8 trillion leading 0s?

      0 0 Reply
  12. ShandyMan

    Sophos protecting the NHS ...

    I was under the impression that other vendors released an update to battle this as well (e.g McAfee , ...)

    It should also be noted , sophos released several updates (based on the original variant ) , especially around 1 am from memory , making the previous update redundant. Saying you pushed an update at a specific time doesn't really count when you released several more afterwards (implying the original one wasn't working). Just my perspective (NHS infrastructure person).

    1 0 Reply
  13. EnviableOne

    1. XP infection rate from wanna Cry is minimal

    2. if NHS had it resource to patch, it wouldn't have mattered

    3. Sopos Intercept X and Exploit Provention (EXP) have been out for 6 months and Have yet to be beaten

    4. Intercept X is exploit based and signatureless

    5. No-one woth Intercepet X or EXP got WannaCry

    6. Sophos are prevelent in the NHS.

    7. We had neither patched or Intercept X and did not get Wanna Cry

    0 0 Reply

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