Trend Micro Internet Security 2008

Trend Micro's software takes the origin of a download into account when determining whether or not to trust it. In theory, this should help it catch unrecognised threats, but in our tests the company's new internet security suite identified malicious downloads from just 29% of sample sites. We were left questioning the efficacy of Trend Micro's origin analysis system, since McAfee's SiteAdvisor already knew that all these sites were dodgy.

There was better news in our straightforward malware-detection test: Trend's 95% score placed it joint-fourth and just 3% off first place. It also kept out 100% of our phishing emails and, coupled with Windows Mail's junk filter, scored a good hit rate with non-phishing spam as well - 89% out of the box.

The firewall performed acceptably, exposing no serious vulnerabilities and showing nine TCP ports as open. We received no warning that we were being scanned, although six alerts were raised during the false-positives test.

The worst surprise was boot time, which, even after multiple reboots, was more than doubled with the Trend Micro software installed. We hope this will be fixed in an update, since there's no obvious need for it: once the software is running, it's simple and fairly responsive, and imposes only average memory usage.

One major feather in this package's cap is the low price: it's one of the more affordable options and has one of this month's wider feature sets. But with its mixed bag of scores and disquieting effect on startup time, it falls short of an award this month.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith