Effective Tuesday, June 1 at 10AM the Device Management Core Team will begin removing Sophos Anti-virus from University owned Macintosh computers running Big Sur (macOS 11). Sophos and Apple continue to work on the problems related to running the anti-virus on this platform.
This is a temporary measure to allow the continued use of Jabber Softphone and VPN on Big Sur Macs while the vendors troubleshoot the problem. Pepperdine's Information Security Office has permitted this change with the understanding that it is temporary and that the bulk of protection on modern computers comes from the security patch updates that will continue to be applied by Device Management powered by KACE.
Adding a different antivirus software at this time is not recommended because of the unknown interactions and the expectation that Sophos AV will be reinstalled this summer.
