Every security product cites audits. Almost nothing explains what they actually checked, or what "passed" really means. Here's the plain-language version.
You'll see the word "audited" on nearly every security product's marketing page — VPNs, password managers, backup services, all of it. It's meant to signal trustworthiness, and often it genuinely does. But almost no one explains what an audit actually involved, which makes it easy to treat the word as a rubber stamp rather than something worth understanding.
An audit means an independent, outside organization — not the company itself — examined a specific claim and reported on whether the evidence supported it. The key word is independent: it's only meaningful if the auditor has no financial interest in the outcome beyond being paid a fee for the assessment itself, similar to how a financial audit works.
Common auditors in the security space include Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, PwC, KPMG) and specialized technical security firms (Cure53, Securitum). Accounting-firm audits tend to focus on whether stated policies and procedures are actually followed — an operational attestation. Technical security firms are more likely to perform deeper penetration testing — actively trying to find exploitable flaws in the code itself, not just checking whether policies are followed.
An audit report "passing" means the auditor found the evidence consistent with the company's claims for the specific scope they examined — not that the product is flawless, and not that every possible attack vector was tested. Scope matters enormously here: an audit that inspected "a sample of server infrastructure" is meaningfully narrower than one that covered the entire fleet. An audit examining one specific feature is different from one covering the whole service.
None of this requires technical expertise to check — it just requires knowing to look past the word "audited" itself and ask who, what, and how recently.