Secure your system with the Yoggie Pico USB hardware firewall

If the sky is looking particularly blue this Monday, do hop down over to Yoggie Security Systems and check out their latest USB-powered hardware firewall, the Yoggie Pico, a newly released and spectacularly miniaturized version of the company’s original Gatekeeper product.

Basically, what both products do is by offloading firewall functions onto a separate hardware device. This obviously increases security as well as the performance of the hosting PC in ways that no software firewall or “security suite” can, even if they try to pull a “360” – whatever that means.

The Yoggie Pico runs on Linux 2.6 along with 13 security applications on a 520MHz PXA270, a powerful Intel processor popular in smartphones and other high-end consumer devices. Poor me, my personal HP rw6818 PDA only runs at 416MHz.

Anyway, for just USD$179 (Pre-order), you can get a NAT firewall, anti virus, anti spyware, anti phishing, anti spam and the usual transparent proxies.

Before you thumb your nose at this just being another marketing gimmick, we’re talking about the likes of Kaspersky for the anti virus, Snort for the IDS/IPS and MailShell for anti spam here.

According to the website:

The device also includes two separate Flash memory units. One of the units stores a secured copy of the Linux OS. During pre boot, Yoggie Pico copies the OS onto the second unit, and uses it during runtime. The original copy of the OS, stored on the first unit, does not include any “Write Access” permissions.

Talk about paranoid. Obviously, the folks at Yoggio know what they are doing.

Would this be something you would purchase for yourself or your company? Join the discussion.