The new intern in a malware coding shop almost certainly starts off grinding on Windows and Android attacks. These two platforms are widespread and easy to crack. It takes expert skillz to craft malware for macOS, but never doubt that those experts are out there, seeking security holes and vulnerabilities. Yes, macOS is better hardened against attack than most platforms, but you still need antivirus protection. Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac gets you lab-certified protection along with a substantial collection of bonus features. Note, though, that the antivirus is the best part; some of the bonus features are rather limited. Trend Micro can keep your Mac safe, but other apps are more generous.
Pricing and OS Support
A single Trend Micro license costs $39.95 per year, roughly the same as Bitdefender, Malwarebytes for Mac Premium, Kaspersky, and others. For most of those, $59.99 per year gets you three licenses; Webroot charges less, at $49.95 for those three licenses.
As with its Windows antivirus, Trend Micro doesn’t offer a multiple-license subscription for Mac antivirus. If you want to protect more than one Mac, you can pay $79.95 for a three-license Trend Micro Internet Security subscription that lets you install a security suite on Windows or this antivirus on macOS. Trend Micro Maximum Security costs $10 more for five licenses that you can use on Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS.
If the idea of paying for Mac antivirus gives you indigestion, don’t reach for the antacid. You can protect your Mac at no charge by installing Avast, AVG, Avira, or Sophos Home Free (for Mac). However, as in the Windows realm, the best paid products go beyond what you can get for free.
As with many competitors, Trend Micro’s minimum supported operating system increases steadily, as new macOS editions come out. Like Kaspersky, it now supports macOS Mojave (10.14) and later. Most Mac users keep their OS up to date, so this shouldn’t be a problem. If for some reason (old hardware, perhaps) you must run an antique version of macOS, you might consider ClamXAV (for Mac) or ProtectWorks, which both extend support back to Snow Leopard (10.6), or Intego, which supports Mavericks (10.9) or later.
You can enter a product key during installation or run Trend Micro as a free trial. Like most Mac antivirus tools, it needs your permission to install web protection for Safari. It also needs full disk access to do its malware-cleaning job. After a quick antivirus update, the product is ready to start protecting your Mac.
A big green checkmark in Trend Micro’s main window lets you know that everything is fine, security software-wise. If any important features are turned off, the display changes to an orange exclamation mark. Don’t let that off-color icon worry you. Just click Fix Now to get back to green. You’ll find simple switches to turn on and off several major features, including web protection, real-time scanning, and camera and microphone protection. A menu of icons down the left side lets you dig into the various security layers Trend Micro offers.
This product’s main window bears no real resemblance to the layout of Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security on Windows. The Windows edition features an unusual round Scan button at the center, with icons floating at the top for other feature areas.
Impressive Results From the Testing Labs
Independent antivirus testing labs around the world regularly put popular antivirus tools to the test and report their findings to the public. I follow a reliable group of four such labs for my Windows reviews, two of which also test Mac-specific products. On Windows, I also use my hand-crafted testing tools. These don’t work on a Mac, so Mac-focused lab results are especially important to me.
When I first rounded up Mac antivirus utilities several years ago, I only included products that appeared in reports from at least one lab. However, the labs don’t stick to the same test set. As you can see in the chart below, at present not quite half of the products come with lab results, with the rest having vanished from the latest tests or, like Clario, never having been tested. Trend Micro bucks this trend, though, with good scores from both AV-Test and AV-Comparatives.
As in their Windows-focused evaluations, the testers at AV-Test Institute rate products on three distinct criteria, assigning up to six points for each. A high Protection score means the product defeated all (or almost all) the sample malware. To get a good score for Usability, the product must avoid wrongly identifying valid programs or websites as malicious. K0-uyeeping a light touch on system resources is the way to get a top Performance score. Like Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, and Kaspersky, Trend Micro topped all three tests, earning a perfect 18 points.
Norton also earned a perfect 18 points, as did Mac-specific Airo Antivirus for Mac. However, these two weren’t included in the latest results from AV-Comparatives.
Reports from AV-Comparatives indicate which products achieved certification, along with the percentage of macOS malware caught. All the tested products received certification. Most managed a perfect 100 percent score—with 99.5 percent, Trend Micro missed perfection by a hair. Many Mac-centric antivirus tools also attempt to detect and eliminate Windows malware. Sure, these nasties can’t infect a Mac, but they might make their way to a PC on your network. Trend Micro wiped out 99 percent of the Windows malware samples in testing, while Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, and Kaspersky managed 100 percent.
Recently AV-Comparatives began testing with Mac-focused PUAs (Potentially Unwanted Applications). Such programs aren’t precisely malware, but they can get in the way or even open your computer to attack. Here again Trend Micro detected 99 percent. Kaspersky also caught 99 percent, while several others managed 100 percent detection.
Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac took perfect scores from both labs. Trend Micro came close, off by just half a percentage point. As far as lab results go, it’s a top product.
Speedy Scan
Clicking Scan Now from the main window launches what the antivirus calls a Smart Scan, which checks for active malware in memory and scours system areas often affected by malware. This scan took just two minutes on the MacBook Air I use for testing. Finishing a quick scan in just a couple minutes is typical for the Mac antivirus products I’ve tested. ESET Cyber Security (for Mac) is an outlier, needing 51 minutes; clearly this product’s definition of a quick scan is different.
I always advise running a full scan immediately after installing antivirus, regardless of the platform. You want to be sure there’s nothing nasty lurking in the system, left over from before you installed protection. As in its previous review, Trend Micro finished its full scan in 28 minutes. That’s longer than in my previous test, but still well below the current average of 40 minutes.
With any existing malware swept away by a full scan, you should be able to rely on real-time protection to foil any new attacks. Just as a backup, Trend Micro schedules a weekly quick scan. You can change that to a full scan if you like, or switch to a daily or weekly scan. On the flip side, Bitdefender, F-Secure, and Sophos Home Premium (for Mac) don’t bother with scan scheduling at all, relying on real-time protection and the occasional on-demand scan.
Like ProtectWorks AntiVirus (for Mac), ClamXAV, and a few others, Trend Micro automatically scans any removable drives you plug into the Mac. For a sanity check on this feature, I mounted a USB drive containing my Windows malware collection. Scanning in the background, Trend Micro quickly identified and eliminated some of the samples, for a total of 54 percent detection.
That 54 percent score for Windows malware detection is not an impressive figure. Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (for Mac) wiped out 100 percent of the same set of Windows samples, and ESET got 93 percent. Note that on Windows Trend Micro also fared poorly in my hands-on malware protection test using these samples.
Ransomware Protection
Ransomware is one malware category that’s made a splash in the macOS world, perhaps because it’s lucrative enough to merit the effort. In theory the antivirus will detect and eliminate such attacks before they can do any harm, but a single miss could cost you big time. As a direct line of ransomware defense, Trend Micro offers Folder Shield, a feature also found in its Windows equivalent. If an unauthorized process attempts to modify files in any protected folder, Folder Shield prevents it and logs the event. If Folder Shield blocked a valid program, you can exonerate it by digging into the log. There’s no option to put an app on the trusted track directly from the Folder Shield notification, the way this feature does in Windows.
Out of the box, Folder Shield protects files in the Documents, Movies, Music, and Pictures folders for the active user account, as well Mobile Documents and files on any mounted USB drives. If your Mac has multiple users, you must add their folders manually. Unlike in Windows, you can add those folders without having to log into the other user’s account.
On Windows, Trend Micro piles on layers of ransomware protection. In addition to Folder Shield, it includes a special behavior-based detection module. It also maintains encrypted copies of files in protected folders, restoring from those backups if necessary. On macOS, Folder Shield is where ransomware protection starts and ends, but it’s still more than you get from many Mac antivirus tools.
Web Threat Protection
A Trojan written for macOS won’t run on Windows, and Windows ransomware can’t harm a Mac. However, phishing is platform-agnostic, relying on fooling you, the user. Phishing sites are fraudulent mimics of login pages for sensitive sites. PayPal and banking sites are popular targets, but you’ll find phishing pages imitating email services, gaming sites, even online dating sites. Whether you’re browsing on a PC, a Mac, or an internet-capable fridge, if you log in to a phishing site, the fraudsters now own your account credentials.
Trend Micro’s Web Threat Protection system helps you avoid both malware-hosting sites and phishing sites, replacing the offending page with a warning. The warning distinguishes dangerous pages from those that are merely suspicious, and it specifically calls out phishing pages as such.
To test an antivirus product’s protection against phishing, I scour the web for the newest reported frauds, making sure to include URLs that haven’t yet been analyzed and blacklisted. I launch each in turn in four browsers. Three are just Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, using their built-in phishing protection. The fourth, naturally, gets protection from the product under testing. If any of the browsers can’t load the page, I deep-six it. If it doesn’t totally fit the profile of a credential-stealing phishing fraud, I discard it. After running through several hundred URLs, I compare protection rates.
Testing on Windows, I use a one-off tool that I coded to launch each URL and automate recording the results. That program won’t run on a Mac, naturally, but I’ve become adept at the button-mashing needed to copy and paste each URL into the browser and manually type in the result.
Last time around, Trend Micro aced the test on both macOS and Windows, with a perfect 100 percent detection rate. This time it also scored the same on both platforms, but a bit lower, 96 percent. That’s still better than most macOS products. At the top, we see Bitdefender with 99 percent detection and McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac) with 98 percent.
For more on how to protect yourself from this sort of attack, check our advice on how to avoid phishing scams.
Trend Micro also marks up links in search results using an extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Not surprisingly, it uses green for safe, red for nasty, and yellow for iffy. You can also turn on Rate links on mouseover, in which case the toolbar provides its rating on any page when you point to a link with the mouse.
The Fraud Buster feature offers to protect you against email that doesn’t contain dangerous links or malicious attachments but may still represent a scam or fraud. It specifically works with Gmail with the Trend Micro extension installed in Chrome or Safari. On Windows, this feature also works with Outlook webmail accounts. Note, though, that it necessarily sends your email messages to Trend Micro for analysis. I didn’t choose to enable this feature for testing, because I don’t care to share my email that way.
Camera and Microphone Protection
A glance at this product’s main window reveals an on/off toggle for Camera & Microphone Protection. This feature offers a degree of spyware protection, but it still needs to evolve before it’s much use.
Webcam protection is becoming a more common feature, and that’s good. Imagine some drooling hacker peeping through your webcam while you’re trying on some sexy lingerie, thinking you’re alone. Typically, such a feature pops up a warning before allowing camera access for any untrusted program. If it’s legit, you click to trust it; if it’s a pervy peeper, just let the privacy system block all access.
Trend Micro’s camera and microphone protection does nothing more than pop up a notification when any program accesses the camera or microphone. It doesn’t say which program, it doesn’t log the event, and it doesn’t stick around for long; blink, and you’ll miss it. I had a hard time getting it to hold still long enough for a screenshot! This feature is no longer new, but I still think of it as the placeholder for something more useful in a future version.
Simple Parental Content Filter
You can optionally configure Web Protection to filter out sites matching any of more than 30 content categories. It’s a very rudimentary form of parental control, and the list of categories seems to display in no clear order. On the plus side, selecting a category gets you a detailed description, in case you’re not sure what the product means by, say, “Tasteless.”
Settings are global to all users, so if you share this Mac with a child, you’ll just have to make an exception any time it blocks a page you want to visit. The log of blocked sites doesn’t show which user account was involved, unfortunately.
Older versions of this tool couldn’t handle secure HTTPS websites, meaning your kids could browse secure porn sites with impunity. Worse, they could connect with a secure anonymizing proxy and totally evade both the filter and activity log. Fortunately, that limitation is a thing of the past.
Inappropriate links in search results get a red highlight and icon, just like dangerous links. Pointing the mouse at the icon displays the category that triggered the warning. And of course, if your kid tries to visit an inappropriate site, Trend Micro diverts the browser to a warning page.
Think about that search markup system for a minute, though. It’s hard to find a site that the filter misses just by trying lots of possibilities. But since Web Protection marks up search results, a clever teen could just search on something like “nude girls” and scan the results for any promising links that are grey (uncategorized) or even green. I had no trouble finding naughty pictures using this simple technique. Maybe content filter markup in search results isn’t such a good idea.
If you really want parental control in your macOS security system, consider using Kaspersky. With Kaspersky, you get a feature-limited version of the impressive Kaspersky Safe Kids. Even with limits on its features, it does more than Trend Micro, and a full no-limits license is just $14.99 per year. In addition to content filtering, you can set it to just warn older kids about bad sites, rather than blocking. You can set it to block device access after a certain daily limit, or just warn that time’s up. You can also ban or time-limit specific apps.
Social Network Privacy Scan
In Chrome or Firefox (but not Safari), the Trend Micro Toolbar includes a social network privacy scanner. This feature checks to make sure you’ve configured security properly in Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You simply log into each account to let the scanner check your settings.
The toolbar reported no problems with my Facebook or LinkedIn privacy. However, Twitter gave me some trouble. Trying to check it under Firefox, I got a message stating that the scan needed some improvements “to keep up with recent changes in the social network.” My Trend Micro contact confirmed that this feature doesn’t work for Twitter under the latest Firefox.
As for Chrome, it stubbornly insisted it was unable to connect with the internet, despite having just used that connection to check Facebook and LinkedIn. My company contact explained that this, too, is a known problem, one that should be fixed by the end of September.
Covers the Basics
Two independent testing labs certify antivirus protection by Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac, which is a big plus. Like its Windows equivalent, it scored well in our phishing protection test. It offers a passel of bonus features, though some are quite limited. For example, its parental control system does nothing but filter unwanted content. And while its webcam monitor notifies you on any use of the camera or mic, it doesn’t identify the program involved, doesn’t log the event, and doesn’t stay visible for more than a short time. Finally, in a multi-Mac household, the lack of volume pricing could make this an expensive choice.
Like Trend Micro, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac attained certification from two labs. Bitdefender marks up safe and unsafe links and offers its own ransomware protection system. Kaspersky comes with many features beyond simple antivirus, among them webcam blocking and a full parental control system, both of which work better than Trend Micro’s equivalent features. Norton 360 Deluxe (for Mac) got a perfect score from the one lab that tested it, and it includes a no-limits VPN as well as support for Windows, Android, and iOS devices. These three are our Mac antivirus Editors’ Choice products.
Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac Specs
| On-Demand Malware Scan | Yes |
| On-Access Malware Scan | Yes |
| Website Rating | Yes |
| Malicious URL Blocking | Yes |
| Phishing Protection | Yes |
| Behavior-Based Detection | No |
| Vulnerability Scan | No |
| Firewall | No |
