Maybe you've got an Amazon Echo, or its little sister, the Amazon Dot. Maybe you'll add some internet-connected lightbulbs to your home to save electricity and set a cool mood. Who knows—maybe someday you'll have a "smart" fridge that alerts you whenever you need to re-up on milk, or when your chicken breast is about to go bad.

While the rise of the smart home is exciting, it can also bring to light some serious complications when it comes to security. Luckily, the brilliant minds behind the CUJO Smart Internet Security Firewall have created a solution to many of those woes—and it's available today.

WHAT MAKES IT A MUST-HAVE?

Why is CUJO essential for connected living? While the Internet of Things has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 5 years, its security standards have yet to mature, and that's a big problem. Hackers of yesteryear targeted mainly PCs and mobile devices to harvest a user's personal information, and in most cases they could be easily thwarted by anti-virus software. But now, with the rise of home automation, these intruders have the opportunity to manipulate and control your property in the physical world as well as the virtual one. They may target your Amazon Echo to surveil your private conversations, gleaning sensitive information about your finances; they could hack into your smart lightbulb software to find out when you're likely to be away from home; they could even take control of your vehicle while you're behind the wheel. It's all scary stuff, but CUJO was designed to alleviate these kinds of concerns with the sophistication of an enterprise-level security component, yet with an incredibly user friendly interface and setup process.

HOW IT WORKS

To start protecting your network with CUJO, you can simply plug the device directly into your wireless router with a standard ethernet cable. Unlike other firewall devices that require advanced technical knowhow to set up, CUJO does the hard work for you, all while guiding you through the process on the compatible CUJO app. For each and every device that's connected to your network, CUJO will review and encrypt its data before sending statistics on that data (but not the data itself) to the cloud for further analysis. If a threat is detected, you'll get a notification in the app letting you know what was blocked and why.

"Think of it as an immunity system for your network," says Einaras Gravrock, the company's CEO. In their impressive debut at TechCrunch Disrupt in May of 2016, Gravrock and the CUJO team touted their 50+ years of combined enterprise cyber security experience, and demoed their device's ability to stop unauthorized access to a baby monitor (a viable threat that owners of smart baby monitors face) in real time. The moment the intrusion was detected, the CUJO app displayed this message: "We blocked an unauthorized attempt to access device 'IP camera' from [IP number]." 

Source:Popular Mechanics