Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 review

At £40, Trend Micro’s Internet Security 2010 is more expensive than many anti-malware suites with similar features. As well as the usual virus and spyware protection, it includes a firewall, parental controls and protection against web threats.

Its interface is reassuringly simple. The main window lets you scan your system or update Trend’s virus signatures. The Virus and Spyware Controls tab provides access to configuration screens where you can modify virus scanning and removal behaviour. This allows you to set scan exceptions and the default response when a virus is detected. Another screen configures Trend’s Prevent Unauthorized Changes module, which monitors alterations to Windows’ Registry.

The Personal Firewall Controls tab provides access to the firewall’s security settings slider and a list of programs authorised to connect to the web. Internet and Email Controls allow you to enable and configure Trend’s spam filter and set up data theft prevention, which blocks attempts to send information such as phone and credit card numbers via unsecure web, email and chat protocols. You’ll also find Trend’s parental controls here. These allow you to block access to certain types of web content, specific sites and control what times each user is allowed to access the internet. Finally, you can configure Trend’s outstanding protection against web threats. This blocks unwanted web content according to its status on Trend’s cloud-based domain reputation database.

During our web-threat exposure test, this protection module prevented us from accessing a quarter of the harmful websites to which we exposed our system, and was noted in the logs as having silently blocked content from malicious sources on other pages. The program can also be configured to report every blocked threat, whether it requires your attention or not. Trend’s web defence was absolute; we didn’t need to scan our system for viruses because none ever got that far.

Rock-solid web defence, a simple interface and a good range of features makes Trend Internet Security 2010 an excellent, but expensive, choice for the security of your PCs. Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 is just as good at half the price.

See page 2 for benchmark results.

Basic malware protection

We give programs one point for each of the 20 web threats it successfully defended against (for example, blocking the web page that hosts it or deleting the file as soon as it was downloaded) or neutralised (for example, where a virus took hold but was deleted or rendered unable to run after a full scan).

Overall (including false positives)

These are the basic malware protection scores, with half a point deducted for each of our false positive test programs that was detected as a virus or prevented from running properly without manual intervention.

Complete remediation

The basic protection graph shows how many viruses were deleted or rendered incapable of running (for example, by deleting Registry entries that triggered malicious files hidden in a temporary directory). This graph shows only those incidents in which all traces of malware were either blocked or completely removed from the system.