Even 30 years after they were first introduced, the routers we know and love today are still struggling to find their footing. There is still hope, however, in the form of new devices called “network attached peripherals.”

Not only that, but as companies learn how to better communicate between themselves and their customers, the learning curve of creating a safe net of personal security is becoming more moderate every month.

Last week, I gave you your first taste of the wild world of home router security.

In the report, I delved into a few of the reasons why, even after three decades in business, router manufacturers continue to struggle to maintain pace with hackers in keeping the personal, professional, and financial information of their customers safe from harm.

Now as promised, I’m back this week with act two. I’ll dive headfirst into why even after so much time on the market, our home networking equipment still lags woefully behind the bell curve when it comes to protecting the data you hold most dear.

 still remember the day my dad installed the first antivirus program I’d ever seen on my old Pentium II. Adorned in its signature colors of black and gold, I quickly came to learn all the ins and outs of my Norton Antivirus suite, from queuing up its scanning schedule to understanding what settings I needed to fix to ensure my favorite games of the time (Diablo and Starcraft), wouldn’t be flagged when I played with friends.

Over the years I would form a special kind of love-hate relationship with the many security products that would grace my machines, from McAfee to Kaspersky, AVG and Avast. Their incessant notifications would rarely fail to stress that my subscription was about to run out, and served as a constant reminder of how I was paying good money for the privilege of staying safe.

Over the past few weeks in Decrypt This, we’ve covered everything from which OS offers the best level of security to the top three VPN providers on the market. Now, it’s time to tackle the main gateway that most malware makers use to get from their botnets to your desktop: the web browser.

Though there are clear winners when it comes to which can reasonably call itself “most secure,” each browser in this roundup offers its own unique solution to the problem of how to keep users safe. All four bring different answers to the party, and feature a range of customizable options and apps which reward patience with privacy.

A VPN (short for virtual private network) is a unique method of protecting privacy that works by linking you up to a single, external IP address which prevents the outside world from sourcing where the original connection started. An average provider of this service will usually have a dozen or more hotspots located in different countries, each designed to trick websites and outside servers into thinking you’re somewhere you’re not.

Tor.

This is a word that’s been tied to Edward Snowden, The Silk Road, and Bitcoin. Even the NSA made the front page with its very own PowerPoint presentation on the many challenges it faced while trying (and failing) to crack its elaborate code. What is Tor, where did it come from, and why can’t people stop talking about it?

Time to pack up your booze and party hats. I’ve got one more roundup which is sure to make you think twice before downloading that latest New Years music mix online.

Whether it was a cash register down at Home Depot, SCADA systems installed at nuclear power plant facilities, or even just the webcam perched at the crest of your laptop, if there’s any lesson we learned in 2014, it’s that nothing is safe from the ever-present threat of malware and the hackers that create it.

In this final infection inflection I’ll cover the biggest stories that popped up and even give you a glimpse of what you can expect on the wires in 2015.