8 Techie Gifts for the Security Expert in Your Life


When you think someone might have hacked your social media or you hear that your email provider got breached, who do you turn to for advice? We all have somebody who keeps a finger on the security pulse, someone who knows whether you need to worry and what you should do if there’s a serious problem. Maybe it’s your neighbor, maybe it’s your niece, but they know vastly more than you about online security. Buying a present that plays into their interests is tough when you don’t really understand those interests.

That’s what we’re here for. Browse through our selection of gift possibilities for the security wonk in your life, and feel secure in knowing you’ve made a good choice.

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Total Network Domination

Every techies loves a gadget, and your security techie will adore this network security gadget. A shiny new Firewalla Purple will give your personal security maven a host of features to play with. They may have already chosen a favorite household router—that’s fine, Firewalla works alongside existing routers in several ways. It’s just as happy to take on the job of a router, except for its lack of a full-powered Wi-Fi hotspot. Hey, you can arrange for a mutual friend to gift them a powerful standalone hotspot.

From the associated mobile app, you can see and manage every device on the network and get notifications when a new device connects. If your neighbor starts mooching Wi-Fi, you can cut them off, and bam! You can even fine-tune controls, say, to turn off gaming on your child’s devices during homework hour. Firewalla tracks performance stats for your devices and your whole network. You can set it to block dangerous sites, suppress ads, act as a parental control content filter, and more.

Your techie friend will get a kick out of Firewalla’s advanced abilities. It can function as a VPN client, running traffic for some or all of your devices through a protected VPN server. More impressively, it can function as a VPN server, letting you tunnel back to your home network from wherever you are. When it blocks traffic from a dangerous site, it can display a map of where the attack came from. It’s a fantastic techie toy.

Firewalla Purple…

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