LAS VEGAS—We've seen a ton of new security announcements at CES this year, and much of them, including an upcoming Wi-Fi router and Internet gateway from Arris, is designed to protect your baby cameras, Rokus, smart refrigerators, and any other non-PC devices you might connect to the Internet.
The Arris Surfboard SBG7580-AC is the first device to come embedded with the McAfee Secure Home Platform. It's protection that's nearly identical to the McAfee security software you might have installed on your desktop or laptop, except it extends to every device on your home network. If your baby monitor is hijacked by a botnet, for instance, the router will sense the suspicious traffic and suspend its Internet access.
Unlike a similar router from Norton, though, the McAfee-powered router doesn't provide traditional antivirus protection. Instead of deep packet inspection, it relies on McAfee's Global Threat Intelligence, which ranks the reputations of websites and blocks the most nefarious ones. If you try to visit a known phishing site, for instance, you'll get a pop-up that reads, "the site you're about to visit has been flagged as a potential attack page."
Other features are about what you'd expect from a high-end router interface. There are robust parental controls, which let you create profiles for each member of your family, instead of blocking certain websites on each of your devices. All of the management is accomplished through an Android or iOS app; there's no remembering a random IP address or URL to access the router's settings.
The new Arris will be available at Amazon, Best Buy, and Surfboard.com before this summer, though an exact launch date or price hasn't been announced.
One word of caution for those looking for a router whose design turns heads, like the Norton Core or the Google Wifi: this is an ordinary-looking black box. Executives from Arris and Intel, which owns McAfee, tell PCMag the bland looks are because they want owners to think of router-based security as a necessity, not a luxury. After the rash of cyberattacks that made front page news in 2016, we tend to agree.