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What do the categories mean on the Eero Plus weekly report?

Hi, can someone enlighten me with more detail about the  "inspection categories" listed in the Eero+ weekly security report?  What are examples of "internet services", "professional services", and "specialized shopping"?

Thanks

9 replies

    • Byter
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I have the same questions.  For example, report says 295,000 inspections and I have no idea how it could be so high.  156 Malware blocks on iMacs and iPhones is also unbeliveable ATM because we have never been "infected" with malware on these devices before so I suspect 100% false positives.  Curious what is being blocked.  Reminds me of when the download speeds were erroneously low.

    • macrom
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I ran an experiment - a piece of obvious phishing made it thru my email filters. So I ran Firefox with everything (e.g. scripting) shut off and tried to access the domain of the phish. And it was blocked - to the browser, it looked like domain not found. Definitely Zscaler does something.

    A lot of what I see is spyware blocks, which could include advertising with unsavory habits, for example. My malware block number is lower than yours. I'm not surprised at the number of inspections, that just means the number of DNS resolutions that went thru Zscaler, I think. It takes a lot of DNS resolutions to load a page with 20 to 50 advertisements.

    Still I want to know what these inspection categories are. I'm troubled that nobody from the eero side is answering that question.

    • eero Community Manager
    • Jeff_C
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Official response
    • Reported - view

    Hi everyone —

    First off, I'd like to apologize that this question went without a response. It must have slipped through somehow.

    With regards to the categories, you can read more about what they are through Zscaler's website. There are a lot of different types of websites that fall into each category, but you should be able to get a good idea of each through the examples they provide.

    Thanks again for your patience and understanding. 

      • Byter
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Jeff C. It is still not adding up for me Jeff and hope you can help.  For instance, My weekly report says my household had 42,000 web searches in a week.  That is 4.16 searches per minute.  It just defies logic that we are using google that much.  Any thoughts on how this 42,000 searches report could be accurate and how I can verify it for myself with a sample?  

      • eero Community Manager
      • Jeff_C
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Byter —

      Not to leave you hanging, I'm going to speak with our security team and get a bit more information into what exactly the 42,000 searches mean. While easy to be thought of as search results, it may not actually be searches like going into Google and searching for something. I'll have more to report, thanks again!

      • macrom
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Byter I believe this means 42,000 DNS resolution requests associated with web searches. To the extent that I understand the resolution process, finding the IP associated with a single URL may entail multiple DNS requests as the request is passed up the tree to higher domain name servers. And still more requests happen when you follow a link provided by Google.

      For example, each entry from a Google search looks like it contains a link to some web page. If you hover your mouse over that link, the address of the page appears at the bottom of your browser window. But if you COPY the link and examine its text, you'll find that actually it's a Google URL, and Google will eventually redirect you to the site you wanted. That involves many additional DNS resolution requests, first back to Google and then through their redirection process, their advertising links etc. It's very recursive and complicated.

      That said, I'll be very interested to know what Jeff learns and reports as he researches your question. What I know for sure is that I personally don't understand the details at all.

    • macrom
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Based on Zscaler's very extensive categorization tree, my own weekly Eero+ report appears unsurprising. Obviously to prepare these reports, Zscaler keeps a personalized category profile for every user, even while discarding the specific URLs that are resolved. It's an interesting problem. Corporations (the main market for Zscaler services) really do want to know when/if employees access some site that might pose a legal liability.

    Private and home users just have to trust that this extremely detailed info will not be misused. I can't see how to avoid this tension - if you want the added security (which I think I do, because the cost of getting hacked can be huge), then the provider must be trusted. I can't see any reason why your ISP would be more trustworthy than Zscaler; to the contrary, Zscaler's business model depends entirely on discretion. Ditto Eero. 

      • eero Community Manager
      • Jeff_C
      • 6 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      macrom  —

      Thanks for following up. Your privacy and trust is something we take very seriously. When using eero Plus, no personal information is obtained, and we won't store anything on our servers. We are not in the business of capturing your information to produce ads or anything of the like. We are people just like our customers, and respect the privacy that one would come to expect when using a product that is passing traffic to and from our devices.

    • macrom
    • 6 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I've driven the "malware" and "spyware" blocks in my weekly report down, radically, by installing an ad blocker in Google Chrome.

    However, every week I see one solitary botnet access blocked. Exactly one. It makes me wonder whether one of my machines might have a silent bot infection that periodically tries to "phone home". So far, no virus search has turned anything up. Is a puzzlement.

Content aside

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