Received emails from Exetel (my home BB provider) couple weeks ago about a trial of their new product Home Secure.
It offers threat protection, parental controls and safe search features at a connection level.
After the 2 Months free trial period, a charge of 6/month is the fee.
so far I am quite happy with it.
At that price, I think it's also good for family with kids.
Referrer gets 10% off per referral (up to $10/month per referral) for 6 months.
I have no idea of virus/malware scanner,
I mainly use parental control to set content categories to block drugs, racism, violence, pornography, terrorism.
It works quite well.
I believe you can do everything this does with built-in apps in windows or Free software. And it will probably be better.
Parental control is built-in to Windows since Windows 7. Info, but if you don't like that you can use software like Qustudio or some others
For DNS, you have a few options that you can actually put on your router and it will automatically protect every device connected to that router. You have Cloudfare's DNS for Families(Tip: details at end of page), Cisco's OpenDNS Family Shield, etc. If you want more granular control of DNS, you can always go for Cloudfare Gateway.
You can also check your router as some of them also have built-in DNS categories
For antimalware & virus protection, you have the built-in protection, but you can always use some of the free ones out there, like Sophos, Avast, Malwarebytes, etc.
I dont understand why I have to spend a lot of time on these settings.
exetel offers a free trial, I am happy with it and share it here.
@[Deactivated]: I didn't downvote you, I just wrote the info trying to help, as it's free vs a free 2 month trial. As @ihfree mentions below, for some families small costs add up quickly and if you can do it all for free with probably better outcomes, why not.
Not sure what you mean with having to spend a lot of time on these settings. I'm pretty sure you would have to configure the exetel Secure Home trial as well. Besides if you just change your DNS on your PC or Router, it's much quicker than signing up and installing an application.
I'm really not sure why someone would down vote this comment.
For some families, small costs quickly add up. This offers much of the functionality for free.
safe search features at a connection level.
What does this mean? It implies a MITM cert needs to be installed which is a terrible idea.
from my experience, I wasn't asked to install any certs,
but I found the youtube comments are disabled when safe search is turned on.
Minimal value and would likely encourage risky behaviour. There are likely many easy ways to bypass this. It could be as simple as changing DNS settings. You would more than likely also need to lock down local devices to get value out of this.
Once again, the Exetel fails to cater to anyone with even a small amount of technical knowledge. Their "How does this work?" section gives no actual information.
At the age where you'd need this, kids probably shouldn't be browsing unsupervised. Once they can browse unsupervised, chances are you should be having conversations with them.
It’s hard though to do it all the time, like your 4 year old grabs your phone and all of a sudden they watching a video called ‘sonic waifu wars’, like you can barely block urls on iOS, annoyingly you can’t in exetels modems, now they offer this service.
Interesting recommended videos. I get children reaching for phones, however, basic security means you shouldn't be leaving your phone unlocked. Secondly, this only works when you're at home and while your child doesn't know they can just toggle wifi off.
ISP provided modems, including the Exetel one should, in general, be avoided. They are often low quality products which can introduce security issues.
Apparently they're using a company called "Allot" to provide this service.
There also appears to be additional data retention according to the terms and conditions. Worth keeping in mind when using this or a similar service.
What type of virus / malware scanner do they use? Will it add additional security if I am using kaspersky and malwarebytes on my computers?