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SPONSORED CONTENT: The Smart Home is Getting Smarter and Safer, Thanks to McAfee

By Ken Briodagh

SPONSORED CONTENT: The smart home market is getting bigger all the time, and with every consumer that makes their home a bit smarter, that pace accelerates. In fact, recent market size projections from Statista predict smart home revenue to grow from about $12 Billion in 2016 to $53.45 Billion by 2022.  Statista also expects more than 43 percent of homes to have some kind of connected device by 2022

However, along with all of this growth comes risk for the consumer. The June 2017 McAfee Labs Threats Report showed that 244 new malware are identified every minute, including mobile malware and ransomware. Meanwhile, botnet and DDoS attacks are becoming ever more common and serious, with WannaCry, Reaper, Mirai and the Github DDoS attack making major headlines. In fact, according to a 2018 White House report, malicious cyber activity cost the US economy as much as $109 billion in 2016.

To address that risk, cyber security providers like McAfee are offering solutions right now. The McAfee® Secure Home Platform was recently named an IoT Security Excellence award winner by IoT Evolution for its exemplary and forward-looking strategies to protect consumers from all kinds of potential breaches and bad actors, both in the current security space, and addressing future risks. The company’s real-time threat intelligence system is constantly updated to provide the latest protection to all connected devices. Protecting connected devices, like McAfee is doing, will be a feature of this week's IoT Evolution Expo. 

The McAfee platform is designed to automatically protect every connected device in the smart home, even those smart devices without a display. The user interface (UI) is on an easy-to-use mobile app with many features available via voice command if using Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant, giving the homeowner, and designated occupants, complete control of the home network. Parental controls and monitoring are a major feature, designed to help parents protect kids while they are online.

McAfee has been a well-known innovator in online security for more than 25 years, and with Secure Home Platform, the company is bringing all that experience to bear in protecting all the connected devices of the modern household. Because it works at the router level, every computer, phone, tablet and smart connected device on the home network is covered. The company deploys the solution in partnership with router manufacturers and ISPs to embed the client in the router and support it from the cloud.

The Secure Home Platform client is embedded in the router and supported by McAfee cloud services. The platform is also deployed with robust protections for all connected devices including IoT devices as well as for children in the home, putting parental controls, device management and activity alerts front and center within the mobile app. It has built-in tools like age-based profiles, scheduling features that determine online access times, and alerts on suspicious activity or connections and can even protect WiFi-connected toys and devices that kids might be playing with so that they don’t accidentally become vectors of attack for hackers.

IoT device security can be difficult to accomplish because users can often not able to install software on these devices due to limited resources or storage space or other limitations, so McAfee’s Secure Home Platform operating at the router level is the best way to help keep the downstream devices safe.

Part of the secret to the powerful protections offered by the McAfee platform is the McAfee Global Threat Intelligence system, which provides accurate and continuously updated protection against known and fast-emerging threats. Suspicious traffic on the home network is blocked and then reported to users in real time, straight to the app, and the manager also gets a notification as soon as any new device attempts to connect,. And what’s more, if someone in the family has stumbled into a problematic region of the Internet, Secure Home Platform detects and blocks unsafe websites in real-time.

When a device is connected to the network, Secure Home Platform gathers device-specific details so proper security measures can be taken. Some of these details collected include:

  • Device manufacturer
  • OS
  • Version
  • Device type
  • Existence of McAfee AV software

Secure Home Platform is constantly learning about the devices on the network and over time, understands the expected behavior. This information is then used to improve device protection when a suspicious behavior is detected.

There has been an explosion of Connected Devices globally over the last decade and that trend is certain to continue. This means that there are a rapidly growing number of IoT devices watching, listening, recording, and paying close attention to consumer actions at all times. It also means that there are more and more vectors for attack introduced into the home network every day.

Combating this trend toward risk is an ever-evolving battle, which is why the McAfee Secure Home Platform is designed to automatically protect every single device on the home network. The smart home offers consumers unprecedented convenience and quality of life, but it also can represent greater risks to privacy and security. Only a solution like the IoT Evolution IoT Security Excellence award-winning McAfee Secure Home Platform can protect those consumers and no one does it better than McAfee. More information on McAfee Secure Home Platform can be found at http://securehomeplatform.mcafee.com.

This article was sponsored by McAfee Secure Home Platform. 


The IoT Evolution Expo, and collocated events, IoT Evolution Health, LPWAN Expo, The Smart City Event, and IIoT Conference, will take place Jan. 29 to Feb 1 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Visit IoTEvolutionExpo.com to register now.

Edited by Ken Briodagh
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