Guardio Review

Guardio is a preemptive security measure that provides real-time protection against malicious activity in every website, social account, and cloud service you may use. Guardio checks every site or links you visit from the browser and blocks both known and suspected threats. It also disables malicious browser extensions, those annoying notifications from websites, and more.

What does Guardio have to offer?

Guardio offers services that monitor you while you browse the web. The services will block you from accessing malicious websites, suggest that you remove malicious browser extensions, notify you if your email address is connected to a breach, and more.

Service breach alerts

Service breach alerts and the information about leaks provided by Guardio is their best feature. This feature appears to be using the haveibeenpwned.com API to detail which leaks are responsible for exposing information, but that’s not all.

If your email address was exposed to the public by malicious actors then you will find a detailed list of specific leaks, the breach dates, the number of affected users, and more information including related articles.

Service breach alerts or the information leaks feature is very informative and can protect your privacy if your sensitive information is ever leaked somewhere online.

Malicious site blocking

Guardio claims to use blacklists from multiple and diverse sources to determine which websites are bad and which websites are good so they can block them. Google Chrome and other internet browsers also utilize a similar feature to block malicious and deceptive websites. The malicious site blocking feature provided by Guardio may be a bit unnecessary if your browser already blocks bad sites; However, Guardio promotes itself as diverse which has yet to be proven or debunked.

When you visit a site that is recognized as malicious or deceptive Guardio will block you and show you a page that says “website blocked by Guardio.” The page contains information to help you learn more about why the website may be malicious.

You can also bypass the block by clicking a link they provide on the page.

Extension guard

Guardio says that they analyze each and every Chrome extension that becomes available or was recently updated in the Chrome Web Store in order to determine if an extension should run or be blocked.

While this seems like a great idea, it did not work as well as I expected. It did, however, locate 3 out of 5 malicious browser extensions during our review. That isn’t that bad, but it still was unable to recognize every potential security risks that could be dangerous. Hopefully, Guardio can improve this feature in the future since this service is supposed to give users a peace of mind.

Final thoughts

Guardio and the Guardio for Chrome extension work quite well and may be valuable to people who are concerned about their privacy while browsing the web and using email services. Guardio will alert you and provide you with detailed information if your email address and other data gets leaked, block you from accessing malicious or suspicious websites, and disable and notify you about sketchy browser extensions. It does this all for an annual price of 47.88 USD.

Guardio is not supposed to replace Antivirus programs and VPN services. It will not scan for and remove malware from your computer and it will not anonymize your browsing experience or protect your data from surveillance.