Securifi is now shipping Almond, a Wi-Fi router and range extender with a touch screen interface, in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
First introduced at the 2012 International CES this past January, Almond configures in seconds and does away with PC or Mac based setup or maintenance, according to the company.
Since the product’s initial announcement, security holes on Wi-Fi Protected Setups (WPS) have surfaced, bringing an important feature of Almond to the forefront: wireless network security for even the most basic user. Securifi’s Almond has already addressed this issue at the factory level.
“Many manufacturers are ignoring this problem by enabling WPS by default,” said Ram Malasani, president of Securifi. “Almond ships with WPS initially disabled, and directs users to select a timed enable – allowing just enough time to connect to the router, then disable automatically in order to increase wireless security.”
Additionally, informal research by the company has found that many users (as many as 30 percent) still secure their wireless networks using Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), which is highly vulnerable to hacking. In fact, because WEP is so insecure, Almond doesn’t even offer an option to use WEP through its LCD user interface (though an advanced user can still select WEP through the web interface). The company reports that the most common reason for people using WEP is they dread the hassle involved with changing passwords and other settings. With this frustration in mind, Almond was designed to ensure each step is intuitive for any human to utilize more advanced security features (such as WPA and WPA2), in addition to changing the password.
Almond also ensures your wireless router is kept out of Google’s Wi-Fi location database, which is a privacy issue for some users. The opt-out requires a change in the name of the wireless network (the SSID) to include _nomap at the end of the name. Securifi has ensured that Almond defaults to include the _nomap tag, so the everyday user doesn’t have to worry about taking that extra step on their own.
Securifi’s Almond is available and shipping now through Amazon.com. Other retail and ecommerce facilities will be stocking and shipping Almond later this summer.
