Home Network Monitoring

The average household computer network has become a very active environment of connectivity for a multitude of devices. Devices by different manufacturers and bluntly of different levels of quality, control, and security are all factors now that not many home users are thinking of.

Set-Up, Connections, and iOS App

The FINGBOX is a device that also sits on your network and attempts to watch it for abnormalities that it is reconfigured to either alert or monitor so that you can take action.

It connects to your network via Ethernet and WiFi so that it can monitor both sides of the devices connected. A standard micro USB port powers the device and the iOS app was quick to set up. You create your account in their and then set up some cloud options for alerts and items for emails and contact info. The system is set up so that you can manage multiple FINGBOX devices in multiple locations and this is helpful if you want to support your family or have multiple home offices.

The placement of the device is something that I had trouble with identifying as I wanted it near the center of the house as well as able to detect the most devices nearby in case something abnormal happens like an unknown connection or anything. In my situation, I ended up leaving it in the office about 25′ from the main AP in the house and that’s even through a few walls. It has been functioning as I would expect it and figure as long as it has a good WiFi Signal (and tested with its speed test) you shouldn’t have to keep this too close to the main system if you wanted to observe your home network.

The Alerts

These can span from when devices connect to and leave your network to also devices that might be on your network with open ports. Open Ports are accessible doors on devices that sometimes are used to control or update devices. These ports can sometimes be attacked, overridden or even just used with poor security settings (like default username and passwords) which could then make these devices a problem.

Simple Networks Are Great

What I mean is that if you have a simple, standard network that I think most of the people do – this should work almost all of the time. However, it is not a magical device and it cannot span across multiple routers and cannot always find devices that are on different WiFi SSIDs (WiFi Names) and this can be difficult to sort out without some advanced knowledge. I do suggest using this device or a device like this – it will really give you some insight into the number of devices on your network as well as if they are still on your network. It can even do a little monitoring for new Access Points nearby and it can send alerts if it thinks something has changed on or with your Home Router.

Complex Networks

Here at the Home Office/Lab I am running a few different networks and I found that a little-advanced work like Port Mirroring all of your network traffic to be seen on a dedicated port and then patching the FINGBOX into that port on the Network Switch really gave a lot of about the device’s traffic on the home network – still not 100% perfect – but I don’t think much of anything can be PERFECT.

Additional Controls

The FINGBOX via the application allows you to “shut down” devices that connect to your network that you don’t want on your network or even allows you to shut down devices on your network that you would like to stop occasionally – such as a kids iPod/iPad or laptop. It totally kills the internet connection from the network side and you can schedule for how long of a duration it should do this so that you can take time to manage the issue at hand.

Conclusion and Concerns

I have not seen a huge issue with privacy here, however, I can say that much of the details about your network are sent to the FINGBOX Servers (cloud) and this could make you identifiable in the “Big Data” server-side information stored. Meaning that the details of your computer name, MAC Address, OS and machine type – are now in their knowledge base and they could use that information to help other organizations identify you. This is probably the largest concern I have with such a device – it is here to help you, somewhat protect you, however it comes in with a situation where data is stored on their servers, most likely owned by them, and allowed to do with whatever they want.

As of now, the device has been on the network for a few weeks and has proven itself to be aware of the network and devices around it, it even can tell when a neighbors WiFi seems stronger than previously detected.

Finally, it will periodically scan the network and alert you to ports open and also schedules speed tests and reports to identify some Terms Of Service from your ISP provider so that you can help pin-point outages and issues and bring them up with the ISP Support Teams and maybe get resolution to the issue if it grows or just make the ISP aware you’re monitoring them too.