Security guides
Short, practical explanations of the mechanisms behind everyday computer security. They are written to be useful whether or not you ever buy a security product, and they carry no commercial links.
How antivirus detection works
Signatures, heuristics, behavioural monitoring and cloud reputation — what each technique can and cannot catch.
How to spot a phishing message
The five signals that give away a fraudulent email, and the one check that works when the other four fail.
Password security without the folklore
Why reuse is the real risk, what actually makes a password strong, and where multi-factor authentication matters most.
How these guides are written
Each guide explains a mechanism rather than ranking products. Where a claim is testable we say who tested it and link to them; where it is not, we say so rather than dressing an opinion as a finding. We do not run a laboratory, so we do not publish detection scores of our own. Our editorial policy sets out the rules we hold ourselves to, and our corrections page records every change we have made after publication.
Written and maintained by Ava Johnson, responsible editor, Cape Coral Inc., s.r.o..