Guides
Background explainers that stand on their own. Nothing is being sold in these pages. They exist so that the vocabulary in a security product’s marketing means something concrete by the time you read it.
Every page listed below is free of commercial links and recommends no purchase. The one article on this site that does carry partner links is labelled as such from the first screen onwards. How the site is funded is set out in the affiliate disclosure.
How antivirus software actually works
Signature matching, static heuristics, behavioural monitoring, cloud reputation and exploit mitigation — what each layer catches, what each one misses, and why no single one is enough.
Ransomware: what actually stops it
The five stages of a ransomware attack, the defence that can interrupt each one, and why the backup you make today matters more than the scanner you buy tomorrow.
How to read an antivirus laboratory test
What AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives and SE Labs measure, what their scores do not tell you, and how to avoid being misled by a single number lifted out of one test round.
Passwords and second factors
Why reused passwords are the problem no scanner can solve, what a password manager really protects, and how the second factors differ in strength — from SMS codes to hardware keys.
Recognising a fraudulent message
The six signals that recur in phishing, smishing and fake support calls, why security software cannot solve a judgement problem, and what to do in the hour after you have clicked.
The one article that carries commercial links
Separately from these guides we publish a single product article, disclosed as commercial throughout: Norton AntiVirus Plus — what the entry tier really covers, and who it is for. It includes a public record of the claims we corrected in an earlier version of it, and it names five situations in which we think the product is the wrong purchase.
Reference
Terms used across these guides are defined in the glossary. How any of this is researched and checked is described in how we research, and the rules we hold ourselves to are in the editorial policy.