Applies to: Sophos Home Premium and Free (Mac)
What's happening:
"This device is vulnerable" | "Computer is vulnerable" messages appear when Sophos Home components are not loaded/properly installed.
The most common scenarios in which these messages appear are after a Sophos Home installation/upgrade takes place, or when upgrading your macOS system.
The first steps are to restart the Mac to allow it to load the new/updated components, and to ensure there is no additional antivirus software installed that might be conflicting > See this article.
Additional examples of the alert
Dashboard example:
Sophos Home Shield example:
Troubleshooting steps
macOS 11 Big Sur, macOS 12 Monterey and Ventura
macOS macOS 10.15 Catalina
Ensure no conflicting security software is installed
If you are running multiple security software programs, you may encounter they can conflict with each other. Please remove any other antivirus software while troubleshooting this problem. See: Can I use Sophos Home along other security/antivirus software?
Check if Sophos Home components need to be allowed
This scenario applies mostly to new installations, if you do not see any pending components to be allowed, move on to the next step
- Click on the Apple menu from the taskbar then select System Preferences…
- On the System Preferences window, select Security & Privacy.
- Under the "General" section, click on the padlock at the bottom left to be able to make changes.
- Ensure "App Store and identified developers" option is selected under "Allow apps downloaded from"
- Click the Allow button next to the prompt System software from developer “Sophos” was blocked from loading at the bottom of the Security & Privacy window.
Note: To make changes, you may need to click on the lock, as per the screenshot (bottom left).
(Click on the image to see it in full size)
Restart the mac
If no components are pending, the alert will clear 10-15 minutes after restarting the Mac. This ensures all components are re-loaded on the system.
Check your dashboard settings
If protections were manually disabled via Sophos Home dashboard, re-enable them following these steps: The real-time protection is disabled.