Sophos Firewall End of Life (EOL) Dates & Support Timeline

Sophos Firewall lifecycle status — the real story

Sophos Firewall OS (SFOS, the software on XGS, XG and SG-running-SFOS appliances and on virtual and cloud firewalls) per maintained line, from Sophos's own retirement calendar KBA-000003353 (Software milestones, 'Sophos Firewall software' table; article dated Sep 03, 2026, read 2026-09-09 in a browser because the page is a Salesforce app that returns nothing to plain fetches). Rows are kept as Sophos publishes them: a line is a GA or maintenance-release group (for example '18.5 GA-MR3' is Sophos's row 'SFOS 18.5 GA and MR1/MR1-1/MR2/MR3'); eol = the EOL column; rows Sophos marks SUPPORTED or MAINTAINED carry no date and are current. Release dates are not on this page and are left null, never estimated. End-of-Life notification dates are carried where Sophos prints a date.

Sophos's policy (Network Security Lifecycle Policy): the last two maintenance releases of each maintained feature release are supported, and each new maintenance release triggers the end of life of a predecessor, so the current rows change with every MR and this file is a dated read.

KEV context (CISA catalog 2026.09.08): CISA names this product under three strings, 'Sophos / Firewall' (CVE-2022-1040, CVE-2022-3236), 'Sophos / XG Firewall' (CVE-2020-15069) and 'Sophos / SFOS' (CVE-2020-12271, the 2020 Asnarok SQL-injection campaign, flagged known ransomware use). The SFOS string does not contain the display name, so the join is a force override listing those four CVEs. No version scoping is asserted here.

Sophos Firewall release and support pattern

Of the 27 release lines tracked, 19 are past end of life and 8 are still within support. The next scheduled end of life is 22.0 GA on September 30, 2026 — 21 days from this build.

Computed from the tracked release data at every build — the figures above are the dates in the table, restated, not an editorial estimate.

Sophos Firewall security intelligence

CISA KEV history: Sophos Firewall is named in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog 4 times, most recently on 2025-02-06, including use in ransomware campaigns. Derived from CISA's live catalog at every build.

What does Sophos Firewall end of life mean for your organization?

When a version of Sophos Firewall reaches end of life, the maintainers stop issuing security patches. Vulnerabilities discovered after this date are publicly disclosed on the National Vulnerability Database, exploit code appears on GitHub, and your systems remain permanently exposed.

The CVE blind spot: Most vulnerability scanners check for known CVEs but do not flag the accumulation of unpatched vulnerabilities in EOL software. With a zero-day, nobody knows about the vulnerability. With EOL software, the vulnerability is public — listed, rated, and often weaponized — but no patch will ever exist. This is the most dangerous gap in enterprise security posture.

Organizations running EOL Sophos Firewall should treat it as a vulnerability class in their risk register, apply compensating controls (network segmentation, enhanced monitoring, access restriction), and prioritize migration to a supported version.

Your options when Sophos Firewall reaches end of life

There are four realistic paths. Which one is right depends far more on how long the system needs to keep running than on the version you are on today.

How to choose, in one question: how many more years does this system need to run? Under a year, extended support (where it exists) is usually cheaper than an emergency migration. One to three years, migrate — support purchased repeatedly costs more than doing the project once, and the project only gets harder as the version ages. Indefinitely, migrate now and plan the next migration before it surprises you.

Worth saying plainly, because vendors selling extended support rarely will: extended support is often the more expensive choice over a multi-year horizon. It is the right answer when a deadline is genuinely unreachable, not as a default. Compare the annual fee against the one-time cost of migrating before committing to either.

Formalizing decisions like this across your estate? Our free EOL policy template is a ready-to-adopt policy with risk tiers, remediation SLAs, and audit mapping — no signup, free to use and share.

Extended Support Options

If you cannot migrate immediately, extended support vendors provide continued security patches for EOL Sophos Firewall versions. This is a bridge, not a permanent solution — plan your migration in parallel.

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