Guides
Reference material on consumer online security, written to be useful whether or not you ever buy anything. These pages carry no commercial links.
How antivirus software actually works
Signature matching, behavioural analysis and cloud reputation, explained without marketing language, plus why false positives happen and what quarantine really does.
Read the guide →How to spot a phishing email
The five reliable tells in a fraudulent message, why urgency is the common thread, and what to do if you have already clicked.
Read the guide →Password security basics
Why reuse is the problem rather than complexity, how credential stuffing works, and what a password manager and two-factor authentication each actually protect against.
Read the guide →Public Wi-Fi and VPNs: what actually changes
What HTTPS already protects, what a VPN adds on a cafe network, what it moves rather than removes, and what it does not do at all.
Read the guide →How these guides are written
Each guide explains a mechanism rather than recommending a product. Where a claim comes from a published source, that source is named on the page. Where something is uncertain or varies by vendor and version, the guide says so rather than rounding it into a confident sentence. We do not publish ratings, star scores or testimonials of any kind; our editorial policy sets out why and what else we refuse to do.
All diagrams in these guides are original SVG illustrations drawn by us. No product screenshots, vendor artwork or stock photography is used anywhere on this site.