What is Digital Citizen doing?
Traditionally, reviewers have been focusing on the features and the capabilities of security software. We want to do it differently. We know that a correctly configured program will be able to cope with all the security requirements of an average user. You probably don’t need intelligent packet filters, tunneling features, logging features and fancy activity monitors. You probably just want to block suspicious programs and make sure that your computer is safe from malware and hacker attacks. This is what we are focusing on: How practical is a program in securing your computer? Not what its potential is, but how useful to someone who does not want to put much effort into using it or learning anything about it. We want to find the perfect security program for your grandmother or any other family member who thinks that browser tabs are hard to cope with. There is a logical reason behind this: most users are unlikely to need most of the advanced or “extra” features security programs offer. Furthermore, most users are unlikely to invest too much of their time in actively securing their systems. And even when they do invest enough time, they probably do not like it. As a consequence, it is only fair to assume that most users require accessible software with robust basic features that are easy to configure.
What kinds of security products are we testing?
We are testing mostly commercial products that are distributed in the form of security suites. These products generally offer complete protection and we can evaluate the efficiency of all the important protection modules: firewall, antivirus and antispyware. Running only an antivirus or just a firewall is no longer enough in today’s cyberspace. You need to have at least these three protection layers running on your computer, coupled with anti-rootkit protection and real-time HTTP traffic scanning.
How we do our security tests
During the years, our reviews have evolved a lot in terms of completeness, length and quality. Today we are structuring our reviews in five important test areas: We try to be as complete as possible and provide a good overview of the efficiency of each product. While we don’t have a mathematical formula we use to give the final verdicts, we look at how well each product performs in all of these areas and share our recommendations.
Verdicts and what they mean
We use a five star rating system in order to share our product recommendations:
5 stars - These are the best of the best, top of the top, la creme de la creme. You get the picture! They are security products that we would recommend to anyone, anytime. The tools included by these security suites provide you with an excellent level of protection and they do it in a manner that is great , both easy to understand and to use. Security products can’t get better than this. 4 stars - These are very good security products. We recommend these security suites to everyone, because they are top notch products that are very good at protecting you against all kinds of cyber threats. Four star products are those products that are “almost great” but they stumble because they have a few small flaws. 3 stars - These are good security products. We consider them average solutions and we can recommend them only to people who know what they’re doing. Some of them can be very good in one a rea, like having a very good antivirus engine, while being weak at others, like being unable to provide decent firewall protection. Some products may have weak default settings which can be improved by the user. When you see a 3 star rating, it is important that you read our verdict and the pros and cons we highlighted, so that you better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the product that we are reviewing. 2 stars - These are security products that are mediocre at be st . They are also security products that we don’t like and we don’t recommend to our readers. These products fail to protect their users against threats and, usually, they are also hard to use and understand. 1 star - These are products that you should never use. They are very bad at what they should be doing: protect their users from malware and network attacks.
Besides our five stars rating system, we sometimes also give badges to those security products that shine in one or more areas :
Editor’s Pick - When we give this badge, we want to express the fact that we really like the product that we have reviewed. This badge is given only to products that are way above average and that are also easy to use. In general, we use this badge only for security products that have received a rating of 4 or 5 stars. Best Security - This badge means that the security product we have reviewed offers a great level of protection to its users. These products shine in terms of effectiveness but they might not be as great in other aspects, like usability or performance. This badge can be given to products with a rating of 4 or 5 stars. Sometimes, a product with a rating of 3 might receive this badge, but only when its flaws are not related to the effectiveness of its anti-malware protection.
Conclusion
We hope that this series will remain useful to our readers. We don’t want you to purchase useless security tools and waste your money, while putting your security and privacy in danger. With this series, we are doing our best to identify those security products that are worth considering even on your clueless friends’ and relatives’ computers and devices.