People do care about Router Security

November 22, 2017

Reviews of routers focus on speed. Despite that immature macho perspective, there are adults who care about the security of their routers. I mention this as my RouterSecurity.org website has now served up 1.85 million page views. In the two weeks from Nov. 8, 2017 to the 22nd, it averaged 3,956 page views/day. Not bad for a site that went live in mid-2015 and gets virtually all of its traffic from search engines.

The bad news, is that tech sites that totally ignore router security have way more readers. Two that hurt the most are The Wirecutter and Small Net Builder. The latter site features truly expert router reviews, but has never considered security. The Wirecutter has revised their review and recommendation for the best router many times, but not once has security factored into their decision.

PC Magazine is outright hostile to router security. In October 2017 their How We Test Wireless Routers article said "We test each router in a closed network, with all security options disabled, and we enable any performance-enhancing features." I would do the exact opposite.