Trend Micro Antivirus+ 2015

Trend Micro Antivirus+ 2015- Some antivirus products focus strictly on the essential tasks of shielding your PC from malware attack and eliminating any existing infestations. Others go beyond the basics, in some cases quite a ways beyond. Trend Micro Antivirus+ 2015 ($39.95 per year) falls squarely in the latter camp, with bonuses including spam filtering, a firewall booster, and more.

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.

SecurityWatch

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.