Trend Micro and Cisco recently teamed up to announce their latest offering – Home Network Defender. Designed with the home user in mind, Home Network Defender has been crafted as an easy-to-install and easy-to-manage service for use in homes with Linksys (Cisco) routers. The new lineup of Linksys routers have been custom built with Trend Micro functionality. 
<!--more-->
The ability to lockdown items on the home network is very appealing and this seems like a logical choice that no other vendor or team of vendors have really thought to provide – or at least packaged it so nicely. 

There is a really nice intro <a href="http://us.trendmicro.com/us/products/personal/home-network-defender/demo/index.html">video </a>that I think should be checked out.

Some really nice features that caught my eye:
1.	Parental Controls – Quickly and easily block out content viewed by family members. This Includes access timers and site categories which can be configured per user in the household.
2.	Automatic Safe Web Surfing – Baked in Trend Micro Web Threat Protection is a good thing. With 3 security levels, configuring browsing levels should be very straight forward and easy to manage.
3.	Built in Network Activity Reporting – Quickly report on the internet traffic traveling through your router.
4.	Trend Micro AntiVirus plus AntiSpyware – keep the bad guys out of the home network with baked in virus, Trojan, and spyware protection. This can be installed on up to 4 home computers all included in annual fee of $49.99.


People approach me fairly regularly to clean up their PC or laptop, and if this new offering from Trend Micro and Cisco can stop home networks from getting infected then I’m for it.
