Trend Micro Review: Quick Expert Summary

Trend Micro provides an advanced anti-malware scanner for a good price, but its additional features are pretty inconsistent.

Trend Micro’s real-time antivirus scanner uses a combination of signature-based scanning and advanced machine-learning techniques to detect viruses, trojans, and worms, as well as advanced threats like ransomware, backdoor exploits, and cryptojackers. The malware scanner performed extremely well in my testing, catching almost all of my test malware files — without slowing down my PC.

Trend Micro Full Review

Trend Micro’s malware scanner and real-time protection are excellent, and the program has some good privacy features that help improve both online and offline security.

While some of Trend Micro’s additional features don’t quite stack up against the top antiviruses on the market, it’s a very user-friendly product with high-performing core features, and its different plans will definitely suit the needs of most users.

Trend Micro Security Features

Virus Scanner

Trend Micro’s virus scanner provides excellent anti-malware detection. It uses a combination of signature-based scanning (cross-referencing files against Trend Micro’s massive virus database) and machine learning. It can protect against known malware, as well as zero-day threats and malware variants — which can get past traditional malware scanners.

Trend Micro provides 3 scan options:

• Quick Scan: Scans areas of your computer where security risks are typically found, such as your system folders, background processes, and registry.
• Full Scan: Scans the entire disk (not including files that are password protected or encrypted).
• Custom Scan: Scans files or folders of your choice.

To test the different scan options, I downloaded a huge archive with nearly 1,000 malware samples in it — including viruses, worms, ransomware, spyware, trojans, adware, keyloggers, rootkits, and cryptojackers. I hid all the samples in different locations, making sure some of them went into my system folders and registry.

First, I ran Trend Micro’s quick scan. It only took 3 minutes on my computer, which is pretty impressive (some other antivirus products take 10–30 minutes for a quick scan).

The quick scan identified every malicious sample in my critical folders, which is impressive.

Real-Time Protection

Trend Micro’s real-time malware protection is basic but effective. It monitors your activity on the web and stops you from downloading any malicious files or attachments. It also monitors files on your desktop and blocks them from making changes on your computer.

Trend Micro’s real-time protection can defend against:

• Malware.

• Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPS).

• Ransomware.

• Exploits.

To test the real-time protection, I cleaned my PC of any remaining test samples from the antivirus scanner test, and then attempted to redownload the same archive (containing nearly 1,000 samples). Trend Micro’s real-time scanner detected every single malware file, preventing them from being downloaded and potentially infecting my PC.

Privacy Scanner

Trend Micro’s privacy scanner allows you to adjust your web browser and social media privacy settings for a variety of sites and browsers. To use it on your social media profiles, you need to download the Trend Micro Toolbar and be logged into the social media account you wish to scan. Trend Micro will then look at that account, and open a pop-up window that allows you to easily address any privacy concerns it finds. Trend Micro looks for:

• Who can see your personal information.
• If your social media profile appears on search engines.
• Who can look you up using your email address.
• Who can look you up using your phone number.
• If advertisers can display targeted ads based on your activity.

I downloaded the Trend Micro Toolbar on Chrome and ran a scan on my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.

The scanner only took a minute, and then listed all privacy concerns with an option to easily adjust them. Overall, it’s a convenient feature, especially because many social media sites make it pretty difficult for you to find, understand, or change your privacy settings.

However, the browser scanner portion of the privacy scanner was more disappointing. It only worked with Internet Explorer and Firefox in my testing, even though it’s supposedly also compatible with Chrome. It let me decide whether to allow tracking and password saving on Internet Explorer and Firefox, and to turn their built-in anti-phishing protections on or off.

While this in itself is useful, these features are easily accessible in the web browsers’ own settings, without Trend Micro. And considering that Internet Explorer is pretty much a dead browser (Microsoft has put most of its energy into the new Chromium-based Edge browser), Trend Micro’s browser scanner ultimately isn’t as useful as it could be.

Why should I buy Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac?

The #1 best-selling Mac protection – What sets Trend Micro apart is that we anticipate danger and safeguard our customers and their devices before any harm can come to them. And, Titanium features the same award-winning technology that Trend Micro uses to secure the world’s biggest businesses. With recent major outbreaks of malware like SabPub, Flashback and MacDefender targeting Mac computers, it’s more important than ever for you to have online protection. Trend Micro is the market leader in Internet Security for Mac users. Click here to Buy Trend Micro.

A Cloud Security Leader – Trend Micro Security software for Mac uses the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™. It is a cloud security infrastructure that rapidly and accurately identifies new threats, delivering global threat intelligence to all our products and services.The Smart Protection Network daily facts: Correlates 16+ billion website, email, and file queries

• Analyzes more than 6 terabytes of threat data
• Identifies and blocks 200+ million threats
• Has 1,200 security experts working on surveillance and prevention

*Previously known as Trend Micro Smart Surfing for Mac and #1 ranking based on twelve months of aggregated U.S. retail sales data reported by the NPD Group in May 2012.