Product Reviews

Trend Micro Internet Security 2008 includes everything you need to protect your home network, wired or wireless. Its components are anti-virus, anti-spyware, a utility that protects you against identity theft, and a firewall that monitors both incoming and outgoing connections for any suspicious activity. There's also a parental control feature. Unlike most software, which is only licensed for one system, the price covers installation on up to three PCs.

The anti-virus module performed well. We tested it against a selection of common viruses, including worms and Trojans. These were delivered over a network and as zipped email attachments. All ten were found: sometimes while being downloaded, sometimes while being unpacked, and in one case as the program was being run. The main thing was that all were found.

Our firewall tests also went well. The PC didn't appear to be responding to probes of any of the 33 common ports. The firewall successfully blocked and detected an authorised connection attempt over the network. When the same connection was explicitly allowed and then reattempted, it went without a hitch.

We were also impressed by the wireless network monitor. This utility searches for computers on your network that have an open wireless connection. It advises you not to trust these computers. That doesn't mean you shouldn't share files and folders with any of your PCs

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that are connected via WiFi, it just means that you should monitor traffic to and from these systems as if they were external to your network. This makes sense, because wireless PCs are far more vulnerable to hackers than those using only a wired connection. This program makes it easy to treat their security appropriately, which is a nice touch.

Spam, spam, spam...

We were a little surprised to find the email spam filter turned off by default. Parental controls, fair enough - not everyone has junior users to protect - but the spam filter is far more integral to a good security policy. Still, it only takes a click to turn it on. We tried the parental controls with a variety of inappropriate content, including adult material and hate sites, and it successfully blocked them all. Disappointingly, however, it failed a critical Computer Buyer test when it blocked the website of Scunthorpe United. There really is no excuse for this kind of false positive.

The data theft protection worked fine when we tried to enter prohibited information into a form on a website. As with most information filters, however, there are workarounds that a determined teenager could use to give out protected information over an instant messaging connection, for example.

The program can be quite resource-hungry.We ran it on a PC with an Athlon 64 processor and a gigabyte of memory - not the fastest of specs, but not puny - and the program sometimes took more than two minutes just to start.

Overall, this is a versatile and sophisticated home security suite that comes with some impressive tools. Its main functions performed well, though not without straining our test PC. The parental control's false positive was disappointing, as was the incomplete instant messaging security, though this isn't unique to Trend. A big plus point, however, is the price. To be able to install anentire security suite on three PCs for less than 50 quid is undoubtedly top value.