Plume Online Protect: Protecting your home in the connected age

TL;DR...HomePass security protects all your connected devices from a growing set of internet borne attacks. We are excited to bring this benefit to all our members and hope to make your connected lifestyle a lot safer! We get it, security is a heavy subject and not a lot of fun to read about. But the reality is, we live in a digital age where our growing number of devices and always-on connectivity define our lifestyle. HomePass users have an average of 20 connected devices, including multiple computers, phones, tablets, and over five IoT devices like smart TVs, voice assistants, security cameras, light bulbs, and more. As these devices connect to the internet, they visit sites that may or may not be safe. Hundreds of thousands of new websites are created every day, and while many are safe, others are malicious and can cause loss of data or personal information, slow performance or invasion of privacy.

"25% of all URLs in 2017 were either suspicious, malicious or moderately risky."  Source: 2018 Webroot Threat Report

Malicious websites and servers can host different kinds of attacks including spam, spyware, adware, botnets, phishing, proxy avoidance, keyloggers and more. The attacks go beyond just computers and phones—a recent report from Symantec indicates that attacks on IoT devices grew 600% over the last few years. These attacks target our money and personal, sensitive data like passwords, credit card details, medical records and more!

Traditional Protection

Antivirus solutions—agents installed on our computers or phones to monitor and block malicious activity—can help keep our devices safe from attacks. But who has time to install software on 20 different devices and keep them updated? Moreover, IoT devices don’t have enough compute power or storage to allow the installation of antivirus agents.

Plume’s Approach - Adapt™ Meets Network Cloud Security

HomePass offers a convenient way to protect all your connected devices in the home by sitting at the edge of the home network: the router or gateway. By observing network traffic headers, and matching against a robust threat intelligence database, Guard blocks every instance of a known harmful connection immediately. This protection applies automatically to every device in your home. The threat database is continuously updated, scanning hundreds of millions of domains on the internet multiple times daily, classifying and scoring them as trusted versus harmful.

How HomePass Protection Works

HomePass automatically enables protection for our members’ homes and devices. The most likely way you will interface with the feature is by seeing an “Access blocked” message on a potentially harmful website while browsing. You can open the HomePass app to see a timeline of protection events at the device, user, or home level.

Customized Access Permissions

In most cases, you should not need to grant a device access to a website that has been blocked for a security reason. However, if you trust the site, you can approve access for the device, user, or entire home. You can also personalize and build your own “Approve” or “Block” list for ultimate control.

Privacy and Plume

Plume's security features have been designed with a privacy-first mentality, ensuring we offer effective protection against today's threats while respecting our members and their data privacy. Since security features inherently require more information to protect your devices than Plume's basic services, users are in full control of enabling, disabling, and customizing the features. Plume security monitors device network headers like DNS, IP address and packet sizes and checks if they are safe. It does not inspect the data exchanged between your devices and the internet servers, so your privacy is preserved. Additionally, Plume keeps your data confidential, so only you can see the protection events in your app. We do not share any confidential data with third parties. For more information, please check out Plume's Privacy Policy.