Bitdefender Home Scanner checks your network devices for vulnerabilities

Bitdefender has released Bitdefender Home Scanner, a free tool which scans your wireless network, identifies connected devices and checks them for vulnerabilities.

The program claims to spot devices with poorly encrypted or insecure authentication, weak login credentials and "hidden back doors."

This works at a basic level as a simple network scanner. The finished report lists all connected devices, their IP and MAC address, device type, manufacturer and more.

Bitdefender Home Scanner also highlights any issues it finds, for example flagging some devices on our test system as "potentially at risk." Clicking the warning displayed more information, including a section on "How to fix my device."

Bitdefender’s advice seemed to be, well, basic. Essentially it was "make sure that your device or service is up to date" in every issue we checked. Still, a free app isn’t going to be able to provide detailed troubleshooting advice on every wireless device in the world, and once you know there’s an issue you can look into it further yourself.

That’s it for the on-demand scanner, but the program also has an optional "on connect" mode. Turn this on and Bitdefender Home Scanner detects and alerts you to new devices as they connect to the network (handy in itself), and offers to scan them for issues.

Bitdefender Home Scanner is available now for Windows 7 and later. Please note, you’ll need a free Bitdefender account to use the program.