I posted my social security number and a credit card out of my network. I’ve SSHed, Telnetted from my phone, no alarms. Could be wrong, but if it did I’d like to know what threat and what device. I’m pretty sure the wording should be “would have been blocked if they came in” as with how the thing is double NATted I don’t think there’s any chance something busted NAT 1, installed, and attempted to hit NAT 2. I get this message that threats against my protected devices were blocked. Lemme turn the light off, or at least turn it red and slap some legs on this thing. I’ve got enough light pollution with all these blinking lights as it stands. There is no way I can tell to turn off the light.
While it’s not easily mountable, it’s pretty if you’re into white electronic products. It really feels like it could have been about the size of a wallet with an antenna or something and marketing got a hold of it and said “nahhhh… visible antennas are so 2015.” Really, it’s mostly empty space. There is no way to mount this, it appears it’s 90%+ empty, so there’s a device almost the size of a two liter bottle with a glowing ring you now have sitting wherever you managed to find space for it. The next part about this device is it’s a large tube that really feels like it should be in the game Portal. That’s me, I don’t assume the average household is going to require this. I may the special use case butterfly that walks in my house with 30 gigs of data that need offloaded, but that’s what I am – 22 minutes vs 11 minutes was a use case failure for me. Even 4K video is generally only streaming at around 20 mbit from Netflix and Amazon. Now, in general this is not a huge thing – most IoT devices are looking for a 2.4ghz wall-penetrating connection and a very low bandwidth. I asked the people who sent it about it and they had me do some tests, but no. Right off the bat the Bitdefender Box 2 was significantly slower than my WiFi. I plugged in a laptop to the thing and got 400+ once again. I did several tests and while connected to WiFi I never got above 200mbit. Things seemed fine at first, then I tried moving a crapton of data while on the Bitdefender Box 2 and noticed it was only running about 175mbit (I usually get 400+). So I decided to just make the Bitdefender Box 2 its own IoT access point and move things over there. I very much doubt this is an issue for most, however it became a bit of a pain for me.
This became a bit of an issue as I use my computer with my Chromecasts and did not want to double-NAT my computer, which is what appeared to be required in order to have everything on the same shebang. It doesn’t work in bridge mode that I could tell so this segregated my wired devices (also a few IoT things,) from my wireless. What wasn’t easy was getting my network setup ported to it. Seriously, two things had to be unplugged and plugged back in. I had a couple of IoT things that had to be manually reset but it seemed pretty easy to get a cloned WiFi network up and running. The Bitdefender Box 2 cloned my AT&T router settings and walked me through disabling the AT&T WiFi.
Paul’s life so far with the Bitdefender Box 2 You want a review before I write mine, Tom’s Guide has a decent one. The Box 2 provides some real time scanning, vulnerability assessments on known IoT issues, protections from brute force attacks, and probably a bunch more features I haven’t even covered yet.