AdeptBase — antivirus terms explained for Australia

How this site is paid for

AdeptBase carries no advertising slots and sells nothing directly. It is funded through affiliate links. One product covered here, Avast Antivirus, is reached through a tracked link supplied by an advertising network, and the network pays AdeptBase a commission when a reader follows that link and creates and activates an account. You pay no more for having arrived this way, and the commission plays no part in what these pages say, which products are described, or the order they appear in. Every paid link is labelled where it sits, and the arrangement is set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page.

Six words that carry most of the confusion

Security software is sold in a vocabulary that sounds precise and mostly is not. The same six words appear on nearly every product page in the category, and each of them means something narrower than it first suggests. Reading them accurately removes a good deal of the guesswork before any comparison starts.

Real-time protection: The scanner watches files as they are opened, written or executed, rather than only when a scan is started by hand. It describes when checking happens, not how well it works. See the glossary entry.
Signature: A pattern that identifies a piece of malware already known to the vendor. Signatures are exact and cheap to check, and they are useless against anything the vendor has not yet catalogued.
Heuristic: A rule that flags code because of what it resembles or attempts, not because it matches a known pattern. Heuristics catch new variants and also produce most false positives.
Quarantine: An isolated folder where a suspect file is held, encoded so it cannot run. It is a holding position, not a deletion, which matters when the detection turns out to be wrong.
Suite: A bundle in which antivirus sits alongside other tools — a firewall, a password manager, a VPN, a file shredder. The word says nothing about the quality of any single component.
Licence: The number of devices and the length of time a purchase covers. Most disputes about security software are licence disputes, not detection disputes.

The full glossary works the same way: each entry is written to be read on its own, with links out to the pages where the term is put to use.

Where protection on a home computer actually comes from

A common assumption is that installing an antivirus product is the single act that makes a computer safe. In practice, protection is spread across four layers that overlap, and a product bought without knowing which layer it strengthens tends to disappoint. The table below sets out what each layer covers and what it plainly does not.

Four layers of protection on a typical home desktop, and the gap each one leaves
Layer	What it handles	What it does not handle
Operating system tools	Built-in malware scanning, a software firewall, controlled access to protected folders, and the update mechanism itself.	Anything you authorise by hand, and software installed from outside the OS vendor's own channels.
Third-party antivirus	Additional detection engines, web and download filtering, and management tools aimed at non-technical users.	Decisions you make under pressure — handing over a password, or granting remote access to a caller.
The browser	Site reputation warnings, sandboxing of page code, blocking of mixed and insecure content, extension permissions.	Files after they leave the browser, and anything installed outside it.
Backups	Recovery when prevention has already failed, including after ransomware or hardware failure.	Prevention of any kind. A backup that is permanently connected can be encrypted along with the original.

Only the second row is something a purchase can change quickly. The other three are configuration and habit, and they cost nothing. Device security basics goes through them in order, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general guidance for individuals and families at cyber.gov.au.

The product this site is paid to link to

AdeptBase describes one commercial product directly: Avast Antivirus. The description is limited to what the advertising network states in its own listing, because that is the only source AdeptBase can stand behind. The listing says the product is antivirus software; that it is offered for desktop computers running Windows, macOS and Linux, and for mobile and tablet devices running Android, iOS and Windows; and that the action the advertiser pays for is creating and activating an account. It also states that conversions from mobile devices and the business edition of the product are not covered by the arrangement, which is why the coverage here is written for desktop use by individuals.

That is the whole of what AdeptBase knows about the product from the advertiser. There is no price here, no feature list beyond that description, no test score and no comparison verdict, because none of those were supplied and inventing them would be misleading. Product coverage sets out what the listing states, what it leaves unanswered, and which of those unanswered questions you can only settle on the vendor's own site.

Reading a subscription page before you agree to it

Most regret in this category comes from the checkout, not the software. The sequence below is the one worth repeating on any vendor's site, including the one linked above, and it takes about five minutes.

Find the renewal price, not the first-year price. The two are usually different, and the second one is what you will actually pay from year two. If it is not stated on the page, it is normally in the terms linked from the footer.
Count the devices and check the platforms. A licence for five devices is not useful if three of yours run an operating system the product does not cover.
Check what automatic renewal does and how to switch it off. Under Australian Consumer Law the cancellation route has to be disclosed; write down where it is before you buy, not after.
Read what is in the edition you are buying. Vendors sell several tiers under one brand, and comparison articles written elsewhere often describe a different tier from the one in your cart.
Note the refund window and the conditions attached to it. A refund policy is a promise the seller makes; consumer guarantees under Australian law sit on top of it and cannot be signed away.
Save the receipt and the licence key somewhere that is not the computer they protect. Recovery is far easier with a record, and a record stored only on the affected machine is not a record.

What this site will not tell you

There is no scoreboard here, and no "best antivirus" verdict. AdeptBase does not run detection tests, does not have access to a test laboratory, and does not reprint scores from organisations it has no relationship with. It does not tell you that your device is at risk, because it cannot see your device and no page on this site examines it. It collects nothing: there is no form, no sign-up, no newsletter and no tracking of any kind, which is the subject of the cookie policy.

What it does is define the terms, describe the mechanisms behind them, point at the questions that decide a purchase, and name the Australian bodies that can help when something has gone wrong.

Australian services worth knowing by name

Several of the questions readers arrive with are not software questions at all. They are questions about who to tell, and the answer in Australia is usually one of these bodies. Each link goes to the organisation's own site.

Australian Cyber Security Centre — the Commonwealth's cyber security agency, which publishes guidance for individuals and small business and operates a reporting route for cyber incidents.
Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre — where scams are reported and where current scam types are described, including the fake technical support calls covered on this site's scams page.
eSafety Commissioner — the regulator for online safety, with complaint routes covering image-based abuse, cyberbullying of children and adult cyber abuse.
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — the privacy regulator, which administers the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the Australian Privacy Principles and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission — the consumer regulator, whose material explains the consumer guarantees that apply to software sold in Australia.

These are descriptions of what each body does, not a claim that any of them endorses this site or anything described on it.

How these pages are put together

Scope is deliberately narrow. Definitions come from how the terms are used consistently across the industry, and are written to be checkable against any vendor's documentation. Statements about a specific commercial product come only from what that product's advertiser supplied in writing, and where the advertiser said nothing, this site says so rather than filling the gap. Statements about Australian law and about regulators are kept general and are linked to the body responsible, because a paraphrase of a statute is not a substitute for the source.

Only one product is covered in detail, and AdeptBase has a paid relationship with that product's advertiser. That is a narrow scope, not an independent survey of the market, and the about page states it plainly along with who publishes this site.

Where to go next

Every page here stands on its own, so there is no required order. If you arrived with a specific word, the glossary is the shortest route; if you arrived with a decision to make, start with the comparison page.

The vocabulary of antivirus software, explained for readers in Australia