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Sophos 9's Buffer Overflow Protection System (BOPS) and Internet Explorer 8

JonKloske

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed any odd behavior of Internet Explorer since upgrading from Sophos 7 to Sophos 9?

We've found that on a substantial portion of our machines (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and possibly even Windows 7) suffer from a reproducible but statistical-in-nature deadlock in Internet Explorer.

I originally reported the problem on Microsoft's Technet forums (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/ef0a7af9-26b9-45b5-a05e-0cfd88c42aee) however it soon became clear that the culprit was Sophos_detoured.dll, part of the BOPS in Sophos 9 (and the timeline of the problem occurred very shortly after upgrading substantial portions of our machines to Sophos 9 from the original Sophos 7 clients they had installed.)

I notice someone else on the MS forums said they had the same problem, so I thought I'd post this here to achieve two things:

1. If other people experience this problem, they may know what's causing it instead of tearing their hair out about it

and

2. Perhaps other people have suggestions or advice

I should point out that we have an open ticket with Sophos about this at the moment [#2345512], and I've discovered at least two workarounds (which are both effectively the same workaround from different directions), so I'm not necessarily after assistance, just healthy discussion and information sharing.

As an aside, after I posted about this issue in a similar way on our internal forums, another IT staff member from a completely unrelated area responded along the lines of "Ahhh! That's what's causing it! We've just been reformatting and re-installing windows since we were stumped by the problems, and we never connected it with the recent upgrade to 9!"

And finally, the easiest workaround to the problem is to disable BOPS and reboot. There's a reghack that achieves effectively the same thing involving the AppInit_DLLs key (see the referenced microsoft forum post for details if you're brave.)

Cheers,

Jon.

:3208


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  • 0

    Hi Lestat,

    We haven't tried turning that option off, but it's worth noting that that option is the only way to detect viruses that Sophos does not have definitions for. This happens surprisingly often on our network (I recently spent two weeks looking at the information provided by this system and found almost 10 previously undetected viruses on our network - a large portion of which other AV products picked up, sadly.)

    The basic procedure for detection of these previously unknown viruses is to watch the Sophos Enterprise Console (go to Endpoints, click on the Status tab and sort by Alerts and errors) and investigate any “Suspicious behavior detected” or “Suspicious file detected” or other alerts. These alerts often (but not always) identify the local path of the file in question, which you should isolate inside a password protected archive file (I named mine “(password=virus)blah.7z”) which should be emailed to samples@sophos.com with the subject line “Sample submitted for analysis“. The body of the email should include the HIPS or other trigger Sophos was tripping on, your full contact details (including your client number or other indication that you're a current customer) and any other information you think is relevant or helpful (such as a rudimentary analysis of the suspected malware, especially any actions you notice it taking like opening browser windows).

    Regards,

    Jon.

    :3550
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  • 0

    Hi Lestat,

    We haven't tried turning that option off, but it's worth noting that that option is the only way to detect viruses that Sophos does not have definitions for. This happens surprisingly often on our network (I recently spent two weeks looking at the information provided by this system and found almost 10 previously undetected viruses on our network - a large portion of which other AV products picked up, sadly.)

    The basic procedure for detection of these previously unknown viruses is to watch the Sophos Enterprise Console (go to Endpoints, click on the Status tab and sort by Alerts and errors) and investigate any “Suspicious behavior detected” or “Suspicious file detected” or other alerts. These alerts often (but not always) identify the local path of the file in question, which you should isolate inside a password protected archive file (I named mine “(password=virus)blah.7z”) which should be emailed to samples@sophos.com with the subject line “Sample submitted for analysis“. The body of the email should include the HIPS or other trigger Sophos was tripping on, your full contact details (including your client number or other indication that you're a current customer) and any other information you think is relevant or helpful (such as a rudimentary analysis of the suspected malware, especially any actions you notice it taking like opening browser windows).

    Regards,

    Jon.

    :3550
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