The reviewer has been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and/or received the product/service at a reduced price or for free.

With five people in my family, we can have a lot of devices connected to our home Network at once. My oldest was using both his school laptop plus his personal tablet to complete his homework yesterday afternoon(something about it being easier to see the article on the tablet while typing notes on his laptop). Meanwhile, my youngest was playing a game on his tablet, while a show we were streaming was playing in the background. In the other room, my middle son was reading on his tablet.

That doesn’t even cover my devices or the other smart devices we have in our home that no one was using right then. Even with all these devices, apart from having anti-virus protection on my laptop and talking to my kids about possible phishing sites, I didn’t do anything to secure our devices. I thought it would be too complicated to do so and I didn’t know how anyway.

But it turns out that it can be really simple to bring business-level security to your home network.

CUJO is one device that will secure all your devices that are connecting to your home WiFi router. You simply connect it to your router and control it with an app. It’s very simple to set up, though I found their tech support to be super helpful when I did have a question, especially through the video chat function in-app, since it was nice to see the person who was helping me, especially since we’re talking about the security of my home network.

You can think of Cujo as a smart firewall for you home. It detects and blocks malicious sites, viruses, and hacks. It works like antivirus for your entire network. You can check under “threats” in your app to see what threats have been detected and to what devices. Plus, the “eyes” on your CUJO will change if a threat is detected.

While the security features of CUJO are what make it practical and helpful, what I really like are the parental controls. More features are coming like time limits and social media monitoring. For now, I like that I can set internet filters to restrict access to certain content, according to category. While (so far) my boys aren’t checking out sites that have adult content, we all know that you’re just one google search away from something really inappropriate, even if it’s by accident when you’re looking for something and you get a weird result. So, I can choose to block “Rated R” sites, “Adult” sites, “Social” sites (if I don’t want my kids on social networking sites). You can block streaming sites, gaming, email, advertising sites, shopping sites, and more. There’s also a feature where you can whitelist sites if a certain site that you do allow your child to visit is being blocked under one of the restricted categories.

My boys are NOT fans of this next feature, but as a mom, I love it. You can turn turn off internet access to certain devices very easily or pause internet access for a given user. Usually, if my kids lose internet/device privileges, they have to actually turn over their devices to me, but with CUJO, I can take away their access with the click of a button in the app. This could also help reinforce device-free hours (like after bedtime).

CUJO does all this and yet it only takes minutes to set up and doesn’t require you to do much after it is set up (unless you want to add parental controls- but even that is super easy). You can check it out at Best Buy.