Many security companies offer protection at three levels: a standalone antivirus; a feature-enhanced security suite; and a top-tier mega-suite that’s maxed out on features. Keeping the feature collections in balance at the various levels is important. A company that pours tons of extras into the basic antivirus must offer even more at the suite level. Trend Micro Internet Security adds on plenty of features beyond what you get with the standalone antivirus, but they’re not all effective. That and some licensing limitations weigh it down. If you want a Trend Micro suite, you’re better off with the top-tier Trend Micro Maximum Security.
How Much Does Trend Micro Internet Security Cost?
Trend Micro Internet Security lists at $79.95 per year for three licenses, roughly the same as Bitdefender Internet Security and Kaspersky. However, Trend Micro lacks the pricing flexibility exhibited by most competitors. If you want more than three licenses, you must upgrade to Trend Micro Maximum Security, which costs $89.95 for five licenses. Note that the previously available 10-license subscription for Maximum Security is gone, replaced by Trend Micro Premium Security, at $139.95 for 10 licenses.
Bitdefender’s $79.99 for three licenses goes up to $84.99 for five and $99.99 for ten—that ten-pack is quite a deal. With Kaspersky, $89.99 gets you five licenses; with some digging, you’ll find a ten-pack listed at $139.99. That same $139.99 per year lets you install McAfee Total Protection on every device in your household, including devices running Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.
It’s worth noting that Norton, like Trend Micro, is also not so flexible. A $149.99 subscription for Norton 360 with LifeLock Select gets you five security licenses, five no-limits VPN licenses, 100GB of storage for backups, and basic levels of monetary remediation from LifeLock. Two additional tiers each raise the price by $100 and give you more of everything, up to unlimited licenses and 500GB of storage. There’s no option to, say, just get additional security licenses.
A big, round Scan button dominates the center of Trend Micro’s unusual main window, while four icons across the top represent four security areas: Device, Privacy, Data, and Family. Pointing at one of those icons lights it up; clicking brings up a page of relevant features. Except for the product name at top left, the main window looks just like Trend Micro’s basic antivirus.
Shared Antivirus Abilities
To understand the core features of this suite, you should start by reading my review of Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security. I’ll summarize my findings here in case you don’t have time to read the antivirus review.
Trend Micro takes mixed scores from the independent testing labs that I follow, all four of which include it in testing. Like Bitdefender, Vipre, and several others, it earned 17.5 of 18 possible points from AV-Test Institute, a score good enough to get it named a Top Product. In the latest test report from SE Labs, Trend Micro, along with almost all tested products, received AAA certification (the best of five levels). In three tests by AV-Comparatives, Trend Micro took two Advanced ratings and one just-passing Standard. And, like McAfee, it failed both tests from MRG-Effitas.
Trend Micro’s aggregate lab score, based on results from all four labs that I follow, is 8.5 points, down from 9.2 at its previous review. That’s the lowest score among products tested by all four labs. Kaspersky Internet Security and Norton, also tested by four labs, scored 9.7 points. Bitdefender managed 9.8, but that was based on results from just three labs.
Trend Micro took a very poor score in our own hands-on malware protection test. With 7.8 of 10 possible points, it’s near the bottom. It’s worth noting that Bitdefender scored second lowest against this set of samples. The difference lies in Bitdefender’s stellar lab scores, which outweigh that poor showing in my hands-on test.
Tested with the same set of samples, G Data scored an impressive 9.8 points. Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus topped the list, with a perfect 10 points.
Challenged to protect a test system against malware-hosting URLs collected in the last couple days, Trend Micro scored a quite decent 94 percent. In almost every detected case, Trend Micro kept the browser from even coming near the dangerous page. McAfee, Sophos, and Vipre aced this test with 100 percent detection, while F-Secure Internet Security and several others managed 99 percent.
Trend Micro also did a good job detecting phishing sites—fraudulent websites that try to dupe visitors into giving away their passwords. It managed 96 percent detection, better than most competing products. Even so, Bitdefender, McAfee, and Norton all detected 99 percent of the samples we threw at them.
Phishing is platform-agnostic—you can foolishly give away your login credentials on any platform that has a browser. Phishing protection, however, can vary. In our current round of testing, though, Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac scored exactly the same as the Windows edition. Kaspersky and Bitdefender also scored precisely the same on the two platforms.
Other Shared Features
Ransomware is a growing threat, and Trend Micro offers multiple layers of ransomware protection. The Folder Shield component prevents unauthorized programs from making changes in protected folders and on USB drives. A behavior monitor looks for suggestions of ransomware activity in programs that made it past the real-time antivirus. And just in case a ransomware attack does some damage before the behavior monitor terminates it, Trend Micro maintains a secure backup of files residing in the protected folders. When we launched a group of ransomware samples that were tweaked by hand to avoid simple signature-based detection, Trend Micro caught them all based on their behavior, identifying half as ransomware and half as merely suspicious.
The Pay Guard component launches a hardened version of your default browser, to protect your online financial transactions. Much like the similar feature in Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and others, it isolates the browser from all meddling by other processes. Pay Guard aims to automatically offer protection when you visit a financial site; if it misses one, you can invoke it with a click.
Like the gaming mode found in many suites, this product’s Mute Mode suppresses security notifications and other interruptions automatically when you go full screen, but it does more to smooth your gaming experience. You can set it to suppress Windows Update notifications, and even configure it to automatically kill specified programs when you turn it on. Mute Mode ends automatically after two hours, or a user-specified timeout, or when you manually disable it.
The Trend Micro Toolbar browser extension marks up links in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge. All links on social media sites, webmail sites, and search results pages get a green, yellow, or red highlight, for safe, iffy, or dangerous. It can optionally rate any link on any page when you hover over it with the mouse.
Trend Micro relies on Windows Firewall to take care of basic network protection. It doesn’t provide the program control system that augments the firewall in many competing products. However, its firewall booster attempts to prevent botnet attacks and other network threats, and warn if you connect to an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot. There’s also a spam filter, but since it works strictly with Microsoft Outlook, its usefulness is limited.
Fraud Buster analyzes your webmail to filter out scams and frauds. It works specifically with Gmail or Outlook webmail when they’re accessed using Chrome or Firefox. Be aware that to do so, it sends all your mail to Trend Micro for analysis.
See How We Test Security Software
Protect More Devices, Macs Included
A little while after installation, the suite pops up a reminder that you can protect more devices using your available licenses. Of course, you don’t have to wait for an invitation. You can click Protect Another Device on the main window to proactively extend protection to another PC or Mac. Do remember that you get three licenses, no more. If you want a five- or ten-license subscription, you must upgrade to Trend Micro Maximum Security.
Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac doesn’t include all the features in this suite, though it goes beyond mere antivirus basics. If you have licenses left over, go ahead and use them. Just be aware that you get more bang for your buck when you install this suite on Windows.
Folder Shield on the Mac works just as it does on the PC, though other ransomware layers aren’t present. Fraud Buster likewise works the same, as does markup of links in search results. Other bonus features exhibit some limitations. Parental control consists solely of content filtering, though it does now handle HTTPS sites. And the webcam privacy monitor proved so limited as to be nearly useless. You can read my review for a full analysis of the Mac product.
System Optimization
When you click the Device icon to open the Device page, you’ll find something that wasn’t present in the antivirus. The PC Health Checkup aims to optimize system performance, in several ways.
On a virtual machine test system, the checkup ran quickly but found nothing to improve. It reported no security vulnerabilities, no startup programs slowing the boot process, no junk files wasting space, and no personal data exposed in browser files and such. It turns out that the optimizer doesn’t worry about junk files unless they take up enough space that whisking them away would make a noticeable difference.
After you let the optimizer make any necessary performance enhancements, it offers to find duplicate files and make optional improvements. There’s no big benefit to cleaning up small dupes; by default, Trend Micro only looks at files at least 1MB in size. You can tweak that size higher, but not lower. I created a trio of identical RTF files nearly 8MB in size and launched the scan, which quickly found the dupes and helped delete all but one.
You can also actively clean up privacy data in four categories, Web Browsers, Instant Messengers, Microsoft Office & Windows, and Media Players.
I let it clean privacy data from Chrome, Edge, and Internet Explorer. It finished in a flash, without any indication of exactly what it cleaned. Cleaning up Windows likewise finished in a flash. As for Instant Messengers and Media Players, it reported no privacy risks present. The security report didn’t include any details beyond “Cleaned.” I’m left not knowing just what this process accomplished.
This kind of junk and privacy cleanup is a common suite feature. Finding duplicate files is less common, though TotalAV and Avira Prime include it. But all the competing products give you a clearer idea of what their cleanup systems do than Trend Micro. Some go so far as to list all the changed they intend to make, while others report what they did ex post facto. With Trend Micro, users have no idea what it did or didn’t do.
Social Media Privacy Scanner
Like Trend Micro’s Mac antivirus, this suite includes a social media privacy scanner, invoked from the main app’s Privacy page or from the browser toolbar’s menu. You log in to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to get a report on any privacy-related configuration problems.
Note that this feature is completely distinct from the Social Networking Protection markup system. That system extends Trend Micro’s markup of safe, dangerous, and iffy links to “popular” social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Mixi, MySpace, Pinterest, Twitter, and Weibo. I remain puzzled at the inclusion of Mixi and MySpace and exclusion of Instagram and WeChat. But that’s a different feature.
I opened the privacy scanner simultaneously in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Notably, in Internet Explorer it only listed Facebook, not LinkedIn or Twitter, and choosing Facebook got a message about needing to “make a few improvements to keep up with recent changes.” Per my McAfee contact, this is a known problem. He pointed out that Facebook itself doesn’t recommend using Internet Explorer, and that Twitter and LinkedIn officially don’t support it.
The scanner worked fine in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. As expected, it reported no concerns for my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. As for Twitter, it gave some advice that I found strange. I broadcast my posts to the world, typically to announce a new review or article. Trend Micro advised that I make my tweets private, which would defeat that purpose. Likewise, I’m happy for people to find my Twitter account based on my email address, but the scanner advised I disable that ability.
The scanner also checks privacy settings in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, with no need to log in. It advised turning on phishing protection in all three browsers, which would normally be smart. We keep that feature turned off for testing purposes. For Chrome and Firefox, it advised sending a Do Not Track header with each web request. Doing so doesn’t hurt, but sites can ignore that header, so it may not help.
Parental Control Remains Ineffective
For parents who want some control over and insight into their children’s online activities, Trend Micro offers a simple parental control system. It lets parents set a schedule for online time, prevent access to inappropriate websites, and impose time limits on specific programs. It also offers detailed reports on each child’s activities. But its most important elements just don’t do the job.
As soon as you enable parental controls, you must define a password to protect the suite’s settings. That makes sense; you don’t want the kids just turning protection off. With that task complete, a wizard walks you through setting up this feature. You can configure it separately for each Windows user account or apply one configuration globally. If you choose the former, the wizard lists all user accounts and lets you identify those belonging to the kids. You can also set a nickname and photo for each child.
First up is the content filter. Trend Micro can block access to sites matching more than 30 categories, arranged in four groups. When you select an age range, it automatically configures an appropriate collection of blocked categories. Naturally, you can customize if you wish. Cautious parents can choose to block any site that Trend Micro hasn’t yet analyzed, and to block finding inappropriate sites via search. There’s also an option to filter out inappropriate images; more about that shortly.
Moving on, you define limits on when and for how long the kids can go online. By default, you define allowed and blocked times by dragging with the mouse on a grid of days and hours. If that seems complex, you can switch to a simple schedule for weekdays and one for weekends. You can also set a daily limit for online time, separately for weekdays and weekends.
There are times when you want the kids using their computers, say, for homework, but need to keep them focused. The Program Controls feature lets you limit or schedule access to games and other distractions. When you add a program to the list, it starts off totally blocked. Using a week/hour grid you can set times to allow access.
For a quick check, I configured the parental control system to block access all day and logged in to an as-if child’s account. No matter what site I tried, I got a message “No Web Surfing Allowed.” That’s a big improvement over my last test, when the access blocking failed for all secure HTTPS pages.
When I last tested this system, something was just broken. The content filter blocked only HTTP pages, not secure HTTPS pages. That’s mostly fixed in the current version, provided your child uses a supported browser. Filtering HTTPS pages didn’t work in my hand-coded browser—they slipped right through. More concerning is the fact that the content filter also did nothing about secure porn pages in Opera.
In browsers that have a Trend Micro extension installed, any blocked page, secure or otherwise, gets replaced by a warning page. In browsers that don’t have an extension but do allow filtering, HTTPS pages don’t load and a pop-up explains why. And, as noted, in some browsers HTTPS pages just slip right through.
This content filter also isn’t as flexible as what you get in more advanced systems like what Bitdefender and Kaspersky offer. With these two products, the filter parses each page’s content, so they can, for example, allow access to a short-story website while blocking erotica. In testing, Trend Micro simply blocked the whole site, or allowed everything, including some truly raunchy stories.
I mentioned earlier that the parental control system offers to filter out inappropriate images. Year after year I keep pointing out that this feature is not effective. When I searched Google for images of unclothed girls, the images appeared briefly before Trend Micro covered them up, and it didn’t cover every single image. I found that clicking on a missed image brought up the preview, and from the preview I could arrow left and right to see all the blocked pictures. In addition, this feature only works in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, not in Edge, Opera, or any other browser. Don’t believe the claims; this feature is useless.
The one feature that did seem to work well was program control. I set it to block Chrome and then switched to the child account. Trying to launch Chrome triggered a Program Access Blocked notification. Launching a renamed copy of the program didn’t fool the system; it still blocked access.
Back in the grownup user account, I checked out the parental control report. It summarized the blocked pages by category and it also offered a full list, with date/time stamp but without specifying the user account involved. HTTPS sites that were blocked showed up in that report, but naturally any missed secure sites didn’t.
There’s one more problem with this system, a problem that might initially seem to be a feature. In a browser with Trend Micro’s extension installed, the content filter marks up results, green for fine, red for blocked, grey for unknown. So, your randy teen need only search for “nude girls” or something inappropriate and stick with the results marked in grey. I had no trouble reaching naughty sites using this simple technique.
Trend Micro’s parental control has been poor and porous for years. Typically, I expect such a feature to eventually get a makeover, but that’s not happening here. The best I can say is that the new, big problems of the previous edition seem to have been fixed, bringing this component back up to poor from utterly dismal.
Bonus Features
Clicking the icons across the top of this suite’s main window takes you to four secondary pages: Device, Privacy, Data, and Family. Family is the parental control system, of course. The other three pages add features not found in the standalone antivirus. I’ve already mentioned the PC Health Checkup on the Device page and the Privacy Scanner on the Privacy page, but these aren’t the only bonus features.
On the Privacy page, you can enable Data Theft Prevention, which protects your personal data from being exfiltrated by spyware or revealed accidentally by your kids. Enabling this feature requires that you protect your settings with a password, if you haven’t already done so for parental control.
Initially, the configuration page offers to save a credit card, advising you to use any seven consecutive digits rather than typing the whole thing. You can add any number of data items, which Trend Micro calls categories. For security, Trend Micro stores the data you enter in encrypted form and never displays it. You can’t even edit an existing item—to make a change you need to create a new data item and delete the old one. Settings are global, not per-user, so with this feature configured correctly your kids can’t give away too much information in IM, email, or web forms. So far, so good!
Last time I checked, this feature had a serious Achilles heel, in that it didn’t work on secure websites. The email and messaging sites your kids might use to reveal too much information almost certainly connect using HTTPS, and there’s nothing to stop a data-stealing Trojan from using a secure connection for exfiltration, so this feature was basically useless.
I’m pleased to say that this time around, Trend Micro is tracking data sent via all websites, not just insecure HTTP ones. When I typed secret data into several popular secure search engines, the Data Theft Protection module kicked in before I even clicked to perform the search.
Many security suites offer some form of encryption to protect your sensitive files. And many of those fail to provide a means for securely deleting the plaintext originals of those files. Trend Micro flips that model on its head, offering secure deletion without encryption in this suite. Upgrading to Maximum Security gets you the encryption system to go with secure deletion.
The Secure Erase feature, found on the Data page, enables a right-click option to overwrite files and folders before deletion, thereby foiling attempts at forensic recovery. You can configure it to use a one-pass Quick Erase, which should foil almost any recovery attempt, or a seven-pass Permanent Erase that’s completely irreversible. Unless you’re the subject of a congressional investigation, the lengthy Permanent Erase is probably overkill.
The Data page also boasts a button that launches a free trial of Trend Micro Password Manager, something you can get without even installing this suite. Note, though, that the best password managers, even the free ones, are vastly more effective than this basic utility.
Small Impact on Performance
If users perceive that security is costing them performance, they’re likely to turn off said security. Fortunately, most modern security suites are designed to avoid gobbling resources or putting a drag on ordinary use of the computer. In my hands-on performance tests, Trend Micro proved to have a light touch.
I should note that this is the first set of measurements using a new PC testbed. The old one gave up the ghost after years of service. The results seem to jibe with what I was seeing before, even though it’s a different test computer.
My boot-time test measures the time from the beginning of the boot process until 10 seconds have passed with no more than five percent CPU usage. Averaging multiple runs before and after installing Trend Micro, I found that the boot time increased by 24 percent. That’s not much, especially considering that most of us reboot only when forced to by Windows Update or other circumstance.
You probably reboot once a day, at most, but you’re working with files all day. To check whether the watchful eye of real-time antivirus protection puts a drag on file operations, I use a script that moves and copies a large collection of files between drives. Another script zips and unzips that same file collection repeatedly. As with the boot time test, I average multiple runs with and without the suite to see the impact on performance.
The file move and copy test took just 8 percent longer with Trend Micro installed, and the zip and unzip test ran 13 percent longer. That’s not a lot; you’re not likely to notice any drag in your day-to-day activities. However, several other products have demonstrated no drag at all in all three tests, among them ESET Internet Security, K7, and Webroot.
Choose the Upgrade Instead
Trend Micro Internet Security earned both excellent and poor scores in independent lab tests. It also aced our hands-on phishing protection and malicious URL blocking tests, but earned a low score in our hands-on malware protection test. Some of its many security components aren’t effective, most notably the parental control system. You get just three licenses to protect your Macs or PCs. Anyone considering this suite should pay a little more for the fully cross-platform Trend Micro Maximum Security.
Bitdefender Internet Security and Kaspersky Internet Security also offer a wide variety of security features, and all their components work well. Both include intelligent firewall protection and effective parental control, and both get excellent scores from the labs. These two are our Editors’ Choice picks for entry-level security suites.
