How to Keep Your Family Safe Online

I have been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and/or received the CUJO smart firewall at a reduced price or for free but all opinions about how to keep your family safe on online are my own.

Do you worry about how to keep your family safe online? I mean it’s not like some freak is going to take our baby’s photos cyber hostage and Liam Neeson is going to magically appear and save the day. We have to be proactive. But who even wants to think about such horrible things? Well, you have to, for your family’s sake.

It’s your business to know how to keep your family safe online.

Have you ever been hacked? Maybe it was your Facebook or your Twitter or maybe on a deeper level, maybe your email or blog was hacked. If it’s never happened to you before or your livelihood doesn’t depend on the Internet, count yourself lucky. Mine does and I have been hacked. It is not fun. Hackers and cyberstalkers make me uncomfortable.

I thought being plagiarized was the worst thing that could happen to me while making my living online. I was wrong. You see, when someone hacks you, takes your site down with a nasty virus or uses a malicious site to impede the growth and functionality of your site, it becomes personal. It feels like someone broke into your house and stole your grandma’s watch that your mom gave you, your diary and your check. It’s pretty awful.

You are left floundering trying to reconnect and reestablish control over what is already yours. Worse, most often, especially if you make your career online, they stop you from having access to your site to make money. They hit you where it financially hurts. Let me tell you, it’s really hard to explain to companies that you have contracts for work with that you just won’t be getting your work in on time because somebody stole your site. It looks unprofessional and reflects badly on you. It may even cause you to lose work. None of these scenarios are acceptable to me and probably aren’t acceptable to you either. There has to be a way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks on our sites.

Here is the first step in how to keep your family safe online.

Enter CUJO. Nope, I am not talking about the rabid dog in Stephen King’s horror movie. CUJO is a smart firewall for the connected home, designed to bring business-level security to the home network. This one device will secure all devices connecting to the WiFi router.

CUJO detects and blocks malicious sites, viruses, and hacks. Think of it like antivirus for your entire network. Plus, CUJO lets you control what your kids access online and keep them safe. Mobile apps let you control your firewall’s settings as it protects networked devices and smart doorbells, cameras, and thermostats against hackers.

So you get business-level internet security in a device that guards all the devices in your home plus parental controls. Oh, and did I mention you can connect to the router and control CUJO with an app. On top of all of that, it is super-fast with a built-in 1GB Ethernet. Basically, aside from protecting my business and my online presence, CUJO protects my family.

Some of the Parental controls features are parental controls for all devices. I have tweens now so we have plenty of devices that need protection. CUJO has an internet filter, allows you to set time limits, monitors social media and allows you to pause the internet. Finally, something I can ground them with that they will actually miss. To streamline your families online experience and give you added peace of mind CUJO provides alerts and reporting capabilities, allows remote administration and you can set up separate user profiles and settings. It’s everything I ever wanted and need with an entire family on the Internet.

CUJO is one of those things that you probably won’t even realize you need until it’s too late and your Internet security has been breached. As my mom has always said, it’s better to be safe than sorry and there are just too many great, security features for me to wait and see. My career, my identity and most importantly, my family means too much to me to not have this security measure put in place.

Do you have your own CUJO? Have you ever heard about this device?

To learn more about how to keep your family safe online, check out more information on Best Buy’s website.