How to run your household security like a pro

If you have a few smart devices, your home is very much like a small company. Not that we think you own ugly grey office chairs, bland laminated table tops, plenty of file cabinets and framed inspirational quotes hanging from your walls — although we won’t judge if you do. It’s the network. Just like your average small company, the modern home has a network of connected devices that interact with each other and with the wider world.

Where things are very different is in the way we manage, monitor and protect our network at home as opposed to the office. Almost any company will have a department or at least a nerdy guy whose job is to make sure the network works well and is safe from viruses, hackers and all the creepy crawlers that populate the internet.

Companies are not usually in the business of throwing cash out the window. They like to be efficient. They like to keep their network under control and to always know what’s going on because any security breach can lose them money, data (which is valuable) and time (so, again, money).

You, on the other hand, most probably won’t pay an IT guy to take care of your home’s cybersecurity, and don’t tell us your cousin who knows a thing or two about computers doesn’t have better things to do than to run checks all day to make sure everything is ok with your Wi-Fi network. Nor will you be able to impose household policies that keep your kid from downloading shady software.

However, your Wi-Fi network and your smart devices face the same threats as a firm’s computers, and you too stand to lose your cash, not to mention your privacy and your peace of mind in case somebody hacks your devices.

The average person owns a few connected devices — in fact, about a third of Americans have more than five, and another third own three or four (check out the numbers here). And here is another statistic that says digital consumers owned 3.64 connected devices (let’s round that up to four) at the start of 2016. Another study published around the same time found that the average UK home had more than eight connected devices.

These devices are all computers, more or less, even though you don’t always call them that: your laptops, tablets, phones, smart thermostats, connected light bulbs, smart speakers, TVs, surveillance cameras and so on — they are all online. And many of them weren’t built with security features and don’t even have an operating system allowing you to install some kind of antivirus.

So if you are rocking a network of devices rivalling those found in small companies how do you make sure you are efficient and protected without hiring an IT department? Managing a computer network is hard work. Just constantly checking for updates for all your devices can take a lot of time.

Fortunately now there is help so you can save money and time, and always stay informed — and you won’t even have to go back to college and become an IT expert. Bitdefender BOX is a smart device that connects to your router and offers complete protection for your entire Wi-Fi network. And it comes with an app that allows you to manage all your devices. It will alert you when a new device wants to connect to your network and will scan for vulnerabilities and backdoors. Plus, Bitdefender BOX comes bundled with Bitdefender’s award-winning security software which can be installed on your Windows, macOS, iOS and Android devices.

It’s your very own nerdy IT guy, only in a much cooler form factor.