Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: security, firewall | Themes: The Internet, Networking, Laptops and Notebooks
- 1. The Urge to Miniaturize Networking Appliances is Pervasive
- 2. Yoggie Pico to the Rescue!
- 3. Yoggie Pico Security Components, Fit and Finish
- 4. Installing and Using the Yoggie Pico
- 5. Testing the Yoggie Pico Pro
3. Yoggie Pico Security Components, Fit and Finish
One fundamental security principle informs the Yoggie Pico Pro’s design and operation: physical separation isolates your computer from the Internet, thereby firewalling any inbound security threats. Driver software diverts the typical Windows TCP/IP network stack to the Pico Pro unit, where content is scanned before release to higher-level network protocol layers. This creates a transparent security appliance with an almost NAT-like filtering environment between the network and your PC.
Security applications included with the Yoggie Pico Pro include:
- Integrated firewall
- Snort Intrusion Detection System
- Snort Intrusion Prevention System
- Sourcefire VRT certified Snort rules
- Kaspersky anti-virus
- Kaspersky anti-spyware
- MailShell anti-spam
- MailShell anti-phishing
- Web proxy
- Mail (SMTP/POP3) proxy
- SurfControl Web content filtering
- Parental Content Control
- Adaptive Security Policy (TM)
- Multi-Layer Security Agent (TM)
- VPN client
- VPN server (Pro model only)
- Layer-8 Security Engine(TM)
This level of capability typically carries with it a serious burden of configuration and setup to become effective, but the Pico Pro offers an amazingly simple setup process nevertheless. Plug it in, install its driver and it’s ready to scrub traffic on your behalf. Annoyed by pop-up reminders notifying you about outdated or updated definitions, signatures or software? No worries here: the Pico Pro silently updates itself hourly. Aside from the Kaspersky, MailShell and VPN components; Yoggie software engineers built the rest of the software themselves (often, as one might imagine, by customizing Open Source packages for the various tasks involved that are so readily available for Linux).
Size and shape are noteworthy in this design, because the Pico Pro extends a fairly wide profile (nearly ½”; 124 mm), which can encroach upon or even displace neighboring USB devices. Our desktop test machine (in an Antec P-180 case) features two side-by-side USB ports on a front panel, where the Yoggie managed to crowd the neighboring USB plug to the extent that it sat visibly crooked in its socket. Despite this potential issue, easily resolved by using a $3 USB extender cable, the Yoggie Pico Pro manages to pack an amazing amount of functionality and capability into its tiny enclosure.
- Previous page Yoggie Pico to the Rescue!
- Next page Installing and Using the Yoggie Pico
Nice, although running an OS that's actually secure (i.e. not windows) would certainly give you most of the same benefits...
Right... because OSX, all the Linux Distros, and BSD all come out of the box preconfigured with up to date antivirus, anti-spyware, traffic shaping, intrusion detection, and content filtering.
Or wait... maybe you're just saying that those OSes are all completely secure and don't need anything else... riiiiiight.
seems like a neat device, did you do any surfing to nether regions of the internet to see what kind of infections it could actally block?
That bit published by Google that malware can install just by visting a site is rather disturbing. Downloading and running a malware program is one thing, but just clicking on a link and getting infected should be blocked by a device like this. Does the pico block such attackS?
Or do I need to maintain my clean and dirty setups. One setup is only for known good sites or offline activity and it is unplugged while the dirty setup is online. Normally the dirty setup is clean, but the anti-virus software has been eaten before.
I purchased 2 of the Pico's (from Yoggie.com) which arrived yesterday. I bought it through their website because they have a promo right now where you get a 3 year license included in the purchase price. The setup and install went just like the review states - perfectly. Not a single problem and it went very quickly (I didn't get the certificate error like the reviewer).
My laptop performance after the install is way beyond what I had expected. Before installing the Pico, opening an Excel spreadsheet from a LAN drive took over 1 minute (with Norton 360 installed). After the Pico install and uninstall of Norton, opening the same Excel document took less than 5 seconds!!! Another performance boost that I noticed was when I wake up my laptop (after about 30 min of inactivity) - it used to take a long time to fully wake up to the point where it was usable again (at lease a min or more - depending on how long it was inactive), where it is virtually instantaneous now.
I've been raving about this little device all day. So far, it ranks among my top 2 gadget purchases ever (right along side my Harmony Remote).
I highly recommend it.
I would be interested in finding out of two computers on the same switch are effected by the USB device. Sometimes I transfer documents between computers on the same network and I would think USB speeds are a lot slower than the Gigabit network interface cards.
I have been using the SOHO Gatekeeper Pro for about 4 months. As an idea it sounds great. Funtionally it is not a practical enterprise solution. For example : whenever the AV database gets updated it slows any function to a crowl. In several instances it just slows browsing, email without even showing that Yoggie's CPU is busy.
Support is horrible. They provide fixes that are broken, in other word no fix. Then they fix the second problem and the support replies that we fixed the issue. While the initial issue is still there.
Additionally, when the automatic update from version 1.3.9 to 1.4.0 they broke the email POP checking and they do not want to fix the issue.
My final thoughts are that it is an unstrustworthy imature security company with bad business practices. Their moto must be "We can break your Yoggie any time we like and we will not support you or fix the issue".
My recomendation is do not buy any equipment from them.
Sorry, but I agree with the previous poster. Access to the internet was very slow after using this devices. Also, the screen snapshots show that the device was NEVER tested against any virus or malware. It's a cumulative graph that can't be refreshed, and they showed ZERO attacks. The device also does not allow any initial secured authentication such as initial logins for things like Yahoo, Gmail,Gdocs, etc with having to be disabled. It must try to block redirected HTTPS authentication. Netflix, wireless printing also do not work. And the "automatic" firmware upgrade to 1.4.0 from 1.3.9 took 50 emails back and forth to tech support to fix. Once it was complete, if fixed none of the above issues.
I bought the Yoggie because it promised to speed up my computer by allowing me to remove Norton which made my pc slow. It actually made surfing the internet slower and receiving emails took for ever.
updates made it worse.