By Marthesh Nagendra, Country Manager – India, ME & SAARC, NETGEAR
The recent technological innovations have made life much simpler for the people over the years. The world of AI, IoT and the plethora of smart home devices that have been introduced to the market have added so much convenience to everyone’s lives. But these innovations in the technology world have its own challenges that can lead to severe consequences if one doesn’t take necessary preventive measures.
There have been a number of stories doing rounds in the media that focused on why this sort of technology should be feared. Today, many cyber-criminals are constantly searching for ways to target vulnerable devices; smart home devices leading to unauthorized access, data theft, and malicious attacks. Various media headlines have been indicating that numerous appliances are being used as access routes into home networks, to hack these devices, hence it is high time that we protect our smart devices against these vulnerabilities.
If you are the owner of a hacked smart device, you are not the only one at risk. These hacked devices are typically assembled into botnets, armies of compromised devices and used to deploy DDoS attacks against other remote targets.
NETGEAR, Inc.’s Armor powered by Bitdefender can be used to protect devices such as smart fridges, TVs, thermostats, robot vacuum cleaners, toasters, coffee machines, baby monitors, and so on. Armor provides multi-layered cybersecurity to defend the connected home and unlimited IoT devices from online threats, at home and on-the-go.
Not only does NETGEAR Armor provide you with strong antivirus and ransomware protection, helping to keep you and all of your family members but also safeguards you from phishing and online fraud, whether you use Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS. It also scans and identifies network security flaws, including those on your smart home devices too.
Remote Hacking
Most smart home vendors don’t think this through but from there but it’s easy to access computers and other devices connected to the same network and the victim will likely wouldn’t even notice. Devices not connected to a network can be even more vulnerable and save hackers a few tiresome steps.
Armor runs on selected NETGEAR mesh router systems and routers to protect networks and connected smart home devices against ransomware, trojans, spyware zero-day exploits, rootkits, malicious links, fraudulent websites intent on stealing personal data such as passwords or credit card details, and other online threats. It’s essentially an anti-virus for your router rather than one you have to install on individual devices, controlled via the app.
Bitdefender’s award-winning anti-virus, anti-malware and data protection software for end devices is built into NETGEAR Orbi Mesh Wi-Fi systems and Nighthawk Wi-Fi routers too, to make IoT security concerns a thing of the past.
NETGEAR Armor includes:
- Web Protection that helps you to browse safely by alerting you to and blocking potentially harmful webpages.
- Bitdefender VPN that encrypts your internet connection to keep online browsing and connection to public Wi-Fi networks private and worry-free. Existing customers can access the VPN feature for free for up to 200MB of encrypted data traffic per day per device, by updating to the latest version of the Bitdefender app.
- Bitdefender Security that provides on-the-go protection for iOS, MAC, Android & Windows devices.
- Active Vulnerability Scans on every connected device in your home.
- Instant Alerts to notify you when threats are detected and blocked through the NETGEAR Orbi/Nighthawk app.
- Anti-theft Protection if your devices are lost or stolen.
Some of the smart gadgets in consumer homes are protected with default credentials; others have hard-coded accounts or come with security bugs in the firmware that can be remotely exploited. Hacked appliances are also often rendered incapable of receiving firmware updates. If devices aren’t getting updates for the rest of their lifespan, which means a whole house filled with vulnerable devices that leave you open to network breaches, data leaks, ransomware attacks and DDoS.
