Trend Micro Review

Here, we’ll take a look at Internet Security, one of Trend Micro’s most popular products.

Internet Security is a fully-packed cyber threat solution that protects your home devices. It’s chock full of tools to keep you safe, yet it is also easy to use.

This makes it an excellent choice for users who don’t want to spend much time trying to figure out their home cybersecurity software.

So what does Trend Micro have in store? Let’s find out!

Price 

Trend Micro Internet Security is relatively inflexible when it comes to pricing. A 1-year license for up to 3 devices costs $39.95. You can get a 2-year license for $59.90, which is a slightly better deal.

And that’s it. There are no options to add devices, you can only switch to more expensive pricing plans.

After the first year, your annual fee will change to the then-current subscription renewal price. Which, as of the moment of writing this article, is $79.95 for a year or $124.95  for two years.

As for the more expensive packages, you can choose from:

• Maximum Security, which offers protection for up to 5 devices. You’ll pay $49.95/year or $99.90/2 years for it. It renews at $89.95 for a year or $139.95 for 2 years
• Premium Security Suite, which protects up to 10 devices and costs $59.95/year. The renewal is $129.95.

Free Version

Internet Security has no free version. Instead, you can download some of Trend Micro’s free tools that have some of its capabilities. No free version of Internet Security, though.

You could, however, download the trial version. It gives you 30 days to test the antivirus software and make up your mind.

Requirements

To run Trend Micro Internet Security, you’ll need a PC with Windows 7, Service Pack 1, a 1 GHz CPU, at least 1 GB RAM (2 GB is recommended), and about 1.5 GB of free disk space.

Installation

The installation of Trend Micro Internet Security is smooth. Downloading the installation file and running it on the device takes approximately four minutes.

After the process is finished, you can leave your email address to receive news and updates. Note that handing over your email is optional, unlike other antivirus products that outright demand this information.

User Interface

The Trend Micro review continues with the way the software looks and feels.

If you like a minimalistic user interface, you’re gonna love Trend Micro. The main screen has four buttons that give you access to most of the software’s features. There is a big button right in the center to help you do scans of your device.

Simple and clean.

On the main screen, you will find a shortcut to the Settings menu, as well as a quick button that gets you a security report of your device.

The Device tab displays all the Trend Micro security settings of your PC. You can take a glance at how those settings are configured, run a PC Health Checkup to optimize your machine, or choose another device to be protected with Trend Micro.

The Privacy tab will help you figure out what information about yourself you are giving away on the web. From this tab, you can check your browser’s privacy settings, as well as do monitoring on your social media privacy settings. It’s also where you can set up protection for your payment data, such as banking credentials, etc.

Moving on with this Trend Micro Internet Security review. The Data tab gathers all the data protection features of this security software. If you need to encrypt files, destroy them forever, or use a password manager – this is the tab to do it from.

The Family tab is about parental controls. Want to prevent your kids from loading porn sites? You can block their access from here.

Features

Trend Micro is full of features, but let’s see if they are actually valuable!

Scanning

You can perform quick scans, full scans, or scan specific folders and files. The software has real-time scanning abilities, which means it checks files for threats even as you open/download them.

Like any other antivirus, Trend Micro can perform scheduled scans. The software has something called a smart schedule. It is an option for the software to perform automated scans without the need for you to schedule them.

Ransomware Protection

If you’ve read any other Trend Micro reviews, then by now you know about Folder Shield, Trend Micro’s ransomware protection feаture. It can protect the content of any folders from ransomware.

Folder Shield is super easy to configure. You need to select folders that the program will watch. Any time a malicious code tries to access and encrypt the files in the selected folders, a notification will show up, telling you about the threat.

Of course, you wouldn’t want to deal with false alarms all the time. That’s why you can create a list of trusted programs that won’t trigger a Folder Shield notification.

Data protection & Encryption

Permanently deleting information from the disk is harder than you think. Luckily, most security software vendors offer a solution for this, and this is where we’re heading with this Trend Micro review.

The suite comes with Secure Erase, which scrambles the already deleted files on your device – that way no one will be able to recover them. You can choose between a quick erase and a permanent erase.

A quick erase will overwrite a file, so it is useless to whoever gets their hands on it. A permanent erase will do the same multiple times; seven, to be exact.

Online Privacy

Trend Micro Internet Security has a nice set of privacy-related features. The Trend Micro Toolbar is a browser extension that tells you how private your profiles are on social media.

Yes, I know, there is no privacy on social media, and yet this little tool can be very useful. For example, it can tell you if LinkedIn is leaking information about you to third parties. It can also do so for some of the other major social media websites like Facebook and Twitter.

Payments protection

What features is Trend Micro loaded with, that help it fight online scams?

Pay Guard is Trend Micro’s feature for protecting financial transactions. You can think of it as an extremely secure browser for online banking and shopping.

You can also access Pay Guard from a shortcut on your desktop. When you click on the icon, it automatically starts your default browser and augments it with the security needed to do transactions online safely.

Pay Guard supports Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but not Microsoft Edge. If you don’t have either Chrome or Firefox, starting Pay Guard will launch Internet Explorer. This is generally to be avoided, as IE is slower and more vulnerable (sorry, Microsoft!) than its competitors.

Parental Control 

What is Trend Micro doing about protecting your children? Quite a bit! Its parental control feature is easy to use and has solid filters that let you have a say over your kids’ activity online.

As with any parental control program, it will lock websites with unsafe content and block potentially harmful apps.

After creating a profile of your child, you will receive reports about their device and activity on the web.

Scanning for viruses

When the team behind Trend Micro says theirs is a quick scan, they do mean quick! This is true not just for the quick scan feature, but also for the full scan option.

I performed a full scan, and it finished in about 16 minutes. That’s less than any other antivirus suite I’ve tested so far. To make it even sweeter, Trend Micro didn’t have a visible impact on user experience while playing various types of content: online video, music, and games.

A quick scan was fully done in just a minute. This is jaw-droppingly fast, when compared to similar products.

Real-Time Protection

Is Trend Micro’s real-time protection good? I did some testing, and this is what I found.

Phishing Protection: 10/10

Trend Micro was impeccable in detecting all phishing websites I fed it.

There was only one sample that the software didn’t label as scam. It was a social engineering scam: one of those send-us-bitcoin-and-we’ll-send-you-back type of schemes.

Still, this is not phishing in the strictest sense, so I don’t consider it a miss.

Parental Control Protection: 7/10

Trend Micro’s default parental control settings could be a little more restrictive. It failed to block a few websites showing uncensored gory videos, as well as an online gun store.

Yes, users can fine-tune the filters and restrict access to a lot more categories of content. But we take into account default settings, and in this case, the Trend Micro security pack has room for improvement.

Downloading the EICAR Test File

Trend Micro did well with detecting the EICAR file: a harmless virus, used for testing antivirus software.

The suite was able to detect the test file when I tried to download it.

It did the same when I tried to download an archived version of it too.

Independent Lab Test

A Trend Micro Internet Security review will not be complete without test scores from the independent research institute AV-Test.

The research lab assigned a 100% success rate to its protection performance.

The test result was based on 334 samples of zero-day malware attacks, and more than 12 000 samples of widespread malware.

The final score for Trend Micro is a solid 6.0 / 6.0, which is the highest possible, and another reason to consider purchasing the Trend Micro antivirus suite.

Customer Support

Trend Micro has done its homework in terms of customer support. Not only do you get a good knowledge database and a user community, but you also have many options to talk to a company representative.

You can connect via phone, live chat, and email. On top of that, you can get help with Facebook Messenger. There’s something for every taste.

Responses are timely, even over email. I got a few queries answered over the span of a few hours. All the agents I got in contact with were also polite and ready to help.

Trend Micro Review - Verdict

To wrap up the Trend Micro review: it’s very hard to provide a truly full-featured cybersecurity suite, but this program is close to achieving it.

Internet Security is an excellent choice for protecting home devices. It packs loads of features and also has an intuitive user interface to boot.

Tech-savvy users will have the opportunity to flirt with the vast array the functions. On the other hand, even newbies will find it effortless to configure the software and then forget about it as it does its job reliably.