HP Business PCs – Poor performance after updating HP Sure Sense to HP Wolf Security

If you have both HP Sure Sense version 4.3 and Sophos Intercept X Endpoint installed on your computer, you might experience performance issues. You can resolve this issue and prevent it from reoccuring.

HP recently upgraded its security products to HP Wolf Security. As part of this upgrade, HP Sure Sense was upgraded to version 4.3. If Sophos Intercept X Endpoint is deployed to the same computer as HP Sure Sense v4.3, the computer can experience performance and stability issues. This can cause it to become unresponsive.

This issue affects HP Sure Sense v4.3 and later and likely affects all versions of Sophos Intercept X Endpoint with Sophos Exploit Prevention (HMPA). This issue is not seen with earlier versions of HP Sure Sense.

Sophos Intercept X Endpoint has an exploit detection component called HMPA, which loads the hmpalert.dll into all monitored processes. This .dll file is also loaded into HP Sure Sense processes. An HP Sure Sense process memory maps files using MapViewOfFileEx, which is the same resource hmpalert.dll uses to access NtQueryVirtualMemory. When both programs try to access this resource at the same time, they both become unresponsive.