Stay safe online and protecting your privacy is a challenge in the internet age. The worst hack of 2021 shows how difficult it is to evade an attack, and Cybercrime is a tangible threat for everyone. That’s what Firewalla Purple is about — it’s a small firewall and router that aims to meet your cybersecurity needs by combining networking, ad blocking, parental controls, and functionality. Virtual private network (VPN) functionality for your home network into a compact purple box.
It’s expensive at $319 and the configuration is quite confusing, but Firewalla Purple comes with an accessible mobile app that allows you to view and control internet traffic going in and out of your home. You don’t need to have expert networking knowledge to use it, although it can be intimidating at first.
Home security
Photo: Firewalla
Even if you Set up your smart home correctly, the risk of being hacked is great. Flaws in everything from Safari arrive Windows arrive Facebook puts us at risk every day. This is part of the reason why Firewalla was founded; co-founder Jerry Chen says someone hacked his daughter’s baby camera. With over 20 years working in data protection at Cisco Systems, he started a line of appliances to protect home networks, and Purple is in the between range.
It mainly acts as a firewall, monitoring and reporting all the traffic entering and leaving your home. Purple maybe also works as a router with short range Wi-Fi, but I recommend pairing it with good Wi-Fi router or mesh system. Otherwise, Wi-Fi won’t cover more than a small room.
To take full advantage of this feature, you need to insert Firewalla Purple between your router and modem, putting your existing router in bridge or access point mode. (You can also connect it to an Ethernet port on your router, but it won’t.) effective as a firewall.) Firewalla’s setup instructions were easy to follow and I was up and running within minutes. All managed through a mobile app on your phone. I’m using a high speed router, but I haven’t noticed any problems or slowness in traffic with Purple managing my network.
This purple rectangle provides intrusion detection and prevention, automatically tightening your network’s security, and looking for suspicious traffic. You can also set up network-wide ad blocking to remove ads from all connected devices on your network. It mostly works. You will still see some ads here and there.
You can configure Firewalla Purple to run your VPN service so you don’t need to install VPN app on every device at home. Even better, when you’re on vacation, it can act as a VPN server (supports OpenVPN and WireGuard). That means you can protect your devices by routing their traffic through your Firewall at home.
It also has the most comprehensive parental controls I’ve seen, providing alerts for activities, scheduled access per device, safe search, and easy blocking of different categories or specific application. For example, you can block porn and gambling, get notifications when someone starts playing Fortniteand set downtime and bandwidth limits for your child’s computer or console.
Control Freak
Courtesy of Firewalla
The Firewall app displays real-time throughput. You can see how much data is being downloaded and uploaded, and all connected devices on your home network. Anything it deems suspicious is automatically blocked. At first, this rich amount of data can be overwhelming. Purple blew up my phone with warnings. It is also very limited by default, so you’ll have to instruct it what kind of traffic is OK on your network.
I was surprised to see a list of thousands of IP addresses blocked within 24 hours of hooking up Firewalla Purple (I haven’t figured this out yet). It takes time to understand things and process what is happening. To manage your network, you use rules. For example, you can block all IP addresses from a specific country, automatically route video traffic over your VPN, or segment your network to keep your smart home devices in one place. separate group.
