Bitdefender’s new Box of tricks will keep your smart home a safe home

Over at CES, Bitdefender has unveiled a new take on its product designed to ensure that your smart home is kept safe from virtual intruders, in this day and age of compromised routers, security cameras and other IoT gadgets being hijacked by the likes of DDoS perpetrators.

The second-generation Bitdefender Box is an IoT security device which defends your home network and all the connected devices therein, from computers to smart TVs, thermostats and light bulbs.

Box makes use of network traffic analysis to maintain your privacy and security, warning against vulnerabilities across all your devices, and it offers enterprise-grade intrusion prevention, inspecting all traffic to (hopefully) spot all manner of attacks and the likes of port scanning activity.

Access control

As well as checking for vulnerabilities, Bitdefender notes that its system will also tell users how to better secure their smart home. It also offers network access control so you can decide who can use your home network, and what privileges they get.

Ciprian Istrate, Vice President Consumer Solutions at Bitdefender, commented: “The number of internet connected devices we own has increased dramatically, so has our exposure to hacker attacks. Now is the time to rethink the way we do cybersecurity before we learn it the hard way.”

As well as the hardware itself, you get a Bitdefender Total Security subscription which covers an unlimited number of Windows, macOS or Android devices – for an asking price of $130 (around £105, AU$180).

This launch follows Symantec’s new secure Wi-Fi router that we reported on earlier today – it has similar sort of built-in protection measures. Indeed, the increasing panic about Internet of Things security as the number of poorly protected IoT devices spreads is likely to trigger more of these sort of smart home security solutions.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).