- Apr 25, 2013
- 5,355
Hands-On Testing
To get a feel for the program's protection, I challenged it with my collection of malware samples. Its real-time protection kicked in the moment I opened the sample folder, quickly eliminating 66 percent of the samples. Note, though, that F-Secure Anti-Virus 2015 wiped out 83 percent of those same samples on sight.
Next, I launched the samples that survived the initial massacre. In several cases it reported the sample or one of its components as suspicious, in some cases with the warning "Please do not open this file unless you trust its source." That seems a bit weak to me—a user could accidentally choose to run malware detected in this way. I made sure to avoid that error.
With 89 percent detection and 8.7 points overall, Trend Micro is just behind F-Secure among products tested with this same malware collection. Note, though, that I give greater weight to ratings from the independent labs than to my simple hands-on test.
Trend Micro's Smart Protection Network gathers telemetry from millions of computers. Among other things, it identifies malware-hosting websites, and instructs your local antivirus to prevent access to those sites. Based on my testing, it really works. The test starts with a feed of very new malicious URLs supplied by MRG-Effitas. I simply launch each URL and note whether the product blocks URL access, eliminates the download, or does nothing.
Trend Micro detected 80 percent of the samples, almost all of them at the URL level. That's the highest score for any product since I started this test almost a year ago. avast! Free Antivirus 2014 previously held the top score, with 79 percent.
Behavior-based detection in last year's edition of this product flagged some valid programs as suspicious or even malicious, and as noted earlier, Trend Micro lost points for false positives in some independent lab tests. For a sanity check, I loaded up 20 PCMag utilities that legitimately make system changes to areas that are also frequented by malware. I'm pleased to say that Trend Micro left all of these legitimate programs alone. I didn't observe a single false positive.
Impressive Phishing Detection
Given its malicious URL blocking performance, I expected great things from Trend Micro in my antiphishing test. I wasn't disappointed.
For this test I gather very new URLs that have been reported as fraudulent but not yet verified. I launch each URL simultaneously on five test systems, each with a different sort of phishing protection. One uses the product under evaluation, of course, and another relies on Norton, a consistent antiphishing winner. The other three use the built-in protection of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
Trend Micro's detection rate came in just 4 percent below Norton's, which is better than 77 percent of the competition managed. Chrome was having a good day, IE not so good. Trend Micro lagged Chrome by 2 percentage points, beat Firefox by 11 points, and came in 48 percentage points better than IE's SmartScreen filter.
Antivirus Plus
There's a clear reason for the plus sign in the name Trend Micro Antivirus+ 2015. In addition to the expected antivirus protection, it gives you a spam filter, a firewall booster, and a link-rating system. Its phishing protection is quite good, and it earned a new top score in my malicious URL blocking test. It doesn't get across-the-board top marks from the independent labs the way some of its competitors do, but if its feature set seems good, you won't go wrong using it.
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