Moving Beyond PC-cillin: Trend Micro Internet Security 2007 Plus TrendSecure Trend Micro's AntiSpyware and Anti-Spam Products Wayne N Kawamoto
Trend Micro AntiSpyware
Trend Micro Anti-Spyware provides comprehensive spyware detection and removal, as well as real-time active defense protection, one-click privacy cleanup, a restore utility, and automatic updates. (These features are also provided in the suite.)
The program competently and quickly scans a PC for known spyware threats that are listed in its regularly updated database. When spyware is discovered, the program serves an option to allow or deny access to the suspect program as well as easy-to-follow tools to safely remove it. An impressive feature, the program can remove spyware without interrupting your internet connection.
The program monitors a PC for suspicious, spyware-like behavior and lets you know when spyware is running in a PC's memory or attempting to install itself. Unfortunately, in use, some of the program's alerts were false alarms for legitimate programs that were running on our test system.
When a security program constantly produces false alarms, users tend to ignore the warnings, or worse, turn off the feature to eliminate the annoyance. Of course, this is an issue that can't be placed solely on Trend Micro — it's a problem shared by the anti-spyware products from Trend Micro's competitors.
A convenient "One-Click Privacy Cleanup" feature protects privacy by erasing browser and PC history, temporary Internet files, cookies, and other "trackware" files that indicate where you've been and what you've been doing. And the Trend Micro CWShredder program is designed to remove the variants of the CoolWebSearch browser hijack.
The anti-spyware engine takes advantage of technology that was obtained through Trend Micro's recent acquisition of anti-spyware publisher InterMute. This technology offers innovations such as the "Venus Spy Trap" behavioral monitoring and the "Rootkit Common Module" that blocks rootkits — Trojan horse-style programs that capture passwords and data and create back doors into systems.
While it's hard to quantify exactly how much these additions improve security, the program did a solid job of identifying the invaders that our test system encountered.
When removing spyware, the restore utility protects a PC by creating a backup of the files that it removes. This allows for quick restoration in the event a useful or legitimate program is inadvertently removed. For now, Trend Micro AntiSpyware is available in North America, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K.
Trend Micro Anti-Spam
At press time, the Trend Micro Internet Security Suite offered comprehensive anti-spam features while the stand-alone Trend Micro Anti-Spam was available in a pilot, pre-release version. The anti-spam features block spam using heuristics technology, route suspicious messages into a spam quarantine folder, and enable you to create approved and blocked sender lists.
As you would expect, the features are maintained via on-demand or automatic updates and seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Outlook by adding their anti-spam options to the program's toolbar. The features offer three levels of spam protection that are organized by categories. As is the case with any security program, the higher the security that you set, the more false positives you can expect to encounter.
In use, at the "medium" setting, the anti-spam engine did an admirable job of identifying and routing spam to a quarantine folder, although, as expected, some legitimate messages were flagged while some spam was let through. At the "high" setting, the number of legitimate e-mails that were flagged went way up.
Unfortunately, detecting and identifying spam is an inexact science. And even when protected by Trend Micro's anti-spam features, our test system still received a pesky e-mail from everyone's uncle (a general, no less) who resides in Nigeria and always has a wad of cash to give away.
No Fraud
To identify threats that are designed to steal important personal and financial information such as bank account and credit card numbers, the suite's fraud defense features attempt to identify online phishing scams. If you've received numerous e-mail inquiries from banks that you've never dealt with before — and that's just about everyone with an e-mail account — you're familiar with these pesky and potentially dangerous schemes.
The anti-phishing feature is easy to set up and notifies you of the latest risks. When possible, the program blocks sites that it recognizes as fraudulent ones. Most users have learned to never enter personal or financial information into a Web form that has been prompted by an unsolicited e-mail. But the suite's fraud defense features are a good second line of defense in the event that one should become careless.
Parental Controls allow you to manage children's internet activity by blocking Web sites that may serve inappropriate content. The program lets you block by categories — for example, gambling, sex, and more. But there's no option to organize blocked sites by user, which is a limitation. Also, in general, it's rather involved to add new sites to blocked lists. The process could be easier.
