Oh thank goodness. The intrusion detection in our router has finally detected some suspicious activity.
We were beginning to feel unloved or, at the very least, unliked. For three weeks we've been running the intrusion detection application on the new Synology RT2600ac Wi-Fi router, and for three weeks it was silent.
No one came knocking on the virtual front door here at the Digital Life Labs. What do Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Convention have that we don't have, we were beginning to wonder. Why weren't the CIA and the US National Security Agency beating a path to our door, spying on our every move? Weren't we important enough? Didn't we have enough hackable IoT devices on our network to launch an attack on the Pentagon?
But just this morning, after updating the firmware on the Synology router, it happened. Three "malicious packets" of data were reported by the the router, and three "high severity" packets were dropped, according to the emails the router has been sending us. Presumably they're the same three packets, detected and then dropped like hot potatoes.
Awesome! We're officially on the internet hackers' radar.
Regular readers of this column might recognise the brand Synology. It's the company that makes our all-time favourite network-attached storage (NAS) device, the DS916, an incredible piece of kit that takes sophisticated functionality and ease of use (two things often at odds with each other) to new levels for home and small business users.
Synology branched out into home networking with its first router, the RT1900ac, last year, bringing to routers the same superb user interface it brought to NAS. And now, with the just-released RT2600ac, it's bringing top-notch functionality, such as the intrusion detection app or high-end VPN connectivity to a device that has up-to-date Wi-Fi networking technology, such as MU-MIMO, to ensure you can get high-speed internet connectivity to multiple devices around your home simultaneously.
Wi-Fi routers haven't been the sort of thing we traditionally review in these pages, due to their inherent dullness. But now, in this era of Netflix and Stan TV, that home networking has become such a critical issue and home IoT devices have become such a major security concern (some of the biggest internet attacks of 2016 were launched from compromised IoT cameras, for instance), we've decided to add routers to our review roster.
And it doesn't hurt that 2017 is starting off with two brilliant Wi-Fi routers: this one, and Linksys' Velop, which we're hoping to review in the next few weeks.
Ka-ching! Another intrusion attempt detected! Somebody loves us! I hope it's the Chinese …
Actually, I just logged into the Synology router using the web browser on my PC and looked at the intrusion alert app, and the latest malicious packet was not from China or Russia or the US, as I hoped, but from inside the network here in the Digital Life Labs! According to the log, it came from some machine with a network MAC address registered to Foxconn, which frankly could be any one of dozens of devices we have here in the Labs (Foxconn is the world's largest contract manufacturer).
So to save time I just called up the "Traffic Control" section of the "Network Centre" app on the router's web page, found the device and banned it from the network. As simple as a couple of clicks. Boom! The threat is eliminated, and I'll investigate it further when I find a gadget in the Labs that can no longer get online.
The Synology's operating system, known as Synology Router Manager (SRM), is by far the best, most feature-rich OS we've ever encountered on a home router. Instead of banning the mystery malicious device, I could just as easily have throttled its bandwidth by setting a custom speed. That's right, with a few clicks of your mouse on the router's web page you can easily set guaranteed (and maximum) upload and download speeds on a device-by-device basis.
Or with another couple of mouse clicks I could just as easily have changed the priority of the device, so it gets better or worse priority than other devices on the network.
Just that one feature alone, which you could use, for example, to ensure that the main TV in your home always gets the best Netflix and Stan connection, is worth the $352 price tag on this router. And that's just one of dozens of great features that come in the router or that you can add by installing new apps through its built-in app store.
There is device-by-device parental control, which you can use to impose web filters, Google SafeSearch and internet allowed times on any devices on the network, again with a few mouse clicks. (The SafeSearch feature automatically filters explicit results from any Google searches on designated devices, in a way that can't be turned off by the device's user, though they could always just use some other search engine. Bing will still produce explicit results even on devices that the Synology has designated as SafeSearch devices, for instance.)
And then there are the file-sharing features, which SRM has inherited from Synology's NAS devices and are unsurprisingly the best we've seen in a router. You can attach a USB 3.0 hard disk to Synology RT2600ac and use it as a pretty sophisticated NAS device, though naturally we'd recommend you get an actual Synology NAS drive if you want the more sophisticated features such as file redundancy.
Of course, the device isn't perfect. We had a little trouble with intrusion detection in earlier versions of the firmware, where it would freeze up when we went to look at the (sadly empty) intrusion logs. Though, in its defence, the intrusion detection app is only at beta stage.
And as I write this, the "Control Panel" app on the router seems to have frozen, forcing me to refresh my browser tab.
Maybe someone is hacking into the control panel right now, now that I have banned the mystery Foxconn device! Maybe they're trying to un-ban it! Maybe it was a camera, and someone at the NSA is just dying to see me in the nude!
I can only hope.
Synology RT2600ac Wi-Fi router
Likes Class-leading user interface, huge feature set, loads of security features, excellent Wi-Fi
Dislikes Looks severe compared with the Linksys Velop
Price $352
