All an antivirus program really must do is eliminate any malware it finds on your system and prevent any new infestations. That’s the minimum, but Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security goes way beyond that minimum. There’s a reason for that plus sign in the name. With Trend Micro you get a raft of bonuses including multilayered ransomware protection, a banking browser hardened against intrusions, and a booster for your firewall. Its test scores range from perfect to poor, but it remains worth a look.
How Much Does Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security Cost?
For $39.95 per year, you can protect one PC with Trend Micro. That's a normal price for a single license; Bitdefender, ESET, and Webroot (among others) come in on or about this price point.
Unlike most competitors, Trend Micro doesn't offer a three- or five-device antivirus subscription. If you want a volume discount, you must upgrade to Trend Micro Internet Security, which lists for $79.95 per year for three licenses that you can use on Windows or macOS devices. At the next level, Trend Micro Maximum Security gives you five licenses for $89.95 per year and extends protection to devices running Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and even Chromebook. At the top of the protection pyramid you can pay $129.95 for the new Trend Micro Premium Security, protecting 10 devices. That gets you everything in Maximum Security plus Trend Micro’s VPN, Dark Web monitoring, and premium support.
If your aim is to protect multiple PCs with a simple antivirus, Trend Micro’s one-per-customer pricing isn’t the best. You can get five G Data licenses for $49.95 or ten Bitdefender licenses for $79.99, for example. McAfee AntiVirus Plus costs $59.99 per year, but that lets you protect all your Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices, not just one PC.
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Getting Started With Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security
During installation you either supply a serial number or opt for a time-limited trial. In addition to the typical license agreement, you review the company’s data disclosure notice, choose whether to receive monthly emailed reports, configure the Folder Shield feature for ransomware protection, and install the Trend Micro Toolbar in your default browser. You also create or log into an online account.
Trend Micro's main window doesn’t look much like other antivirus products, though it has maintained the current look for some years. A big, round Scan button dominates the window, with an indicator below to display security status. Above are four icons for Device, Privacy, Data, and Family. No, the presence of a Family button doesn’t mean this antivirus includes parental control, although its macOS counterpart offers a simple content filtering system. Clicking the Family icon just suggests that you upgrade to Trend Micro Maximum Security.
A lightbulb icon at the main window’s top encourages you to explore more features. It’s a little bit like the recommendations from Bitdefender’s AutoPilot. When you click the icon, it presents a few questions and points out components that relate to your answers.
Lab Results From Ace to Fail
At independent testing labs around the world, teams of antivirus researchers evaluate just how well each product protects against malware attacks of all kinds. The labs can throw serious resources at the testing process, more than I can do myself, so I monitor their results closely. Three of the four labs I follow include Trend Micro, meaning they consider it important enough to track. However, its scores range from perfect to perfectly awful.
Experts at AV-Test Institute rate antivirus products on three distinct criteria. The Protection score is a straightforward rating of how well the product defends against real-world malware. To get a good Usability score, the product must avoid erroneously flagging legitimate programs or websites as malicious. The lower the impact a product has on system performance, the higher its Performance score. Products can receive up to six points in each category, for a maximum of 18.
In the latest test, Trend Micro took all six points in all three categories, earning a perfect 18 points. A dozen other products, among them G Data, Microsoft Defender, and Vipre Antivirus Plus, also earned a perfect 18 points.
The researchers at AV-Comparatives run security products through a wide variety of tests, assigning Standard certification to any that pass. Outstanding performance can earn Advanced certification, or even Advanced+. I focus on three tests from this lab, and Trend Micro appears in all three of the reports, but it doesn’t shine. In the real-world protection test it managed Standard certification, but it didn’t even reach that lowest certification in the simple malware protection test. An Advanced rating in the performance test is nice but doesn’t indicate strong malware protection. At the other end of the spectrum, Avast, AVG, and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus earned three Advanced+ ratings.
At SE Labs, testers scour the internet for real-world malicious websites. Using a capture-and-replay technique, they expose each product to the same recorded attack. Products can earn certification at five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, or C. Almost all the products in the latest test came in at the top, with AAA certification, and none earned less than AA level certification. Trend Micro has frequently earned AAA certification in this test, but the last several reports haven’t included it.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
Most test labs assign scores covering a range of results. With MRG-Effitas, a product that doesn’t exhibit a near-perfect performance simply fails. A third of the tested products failed this lab's latest banking Trojans test, Trend Micro among them. In the broader all-types assessment, a product gets Level 1 certification if it utterly prevents all the malware attacks, and Level 2 if it wipes out all traces within 24 hours. All but one of the most recently tested products passed this test, evenly split between Level 1 and Level 2. The one failure was Trend Micro.
Each lab has a different way of reporting a product’s success, or lack of success. I’ve developed an algorithm that maps each results type to a 10-point scale to derive an aggregate score for each product tested by two or more labs. Trend Micro’s failures with AV-Comparatives and MRG-Effitas dragged it down to 7.4 points, the lowest aggregate score of any current product. Like Trend Micro, AVG and Bitdefender each have three lab scores, but they both earned a perfect 10. Among products tested by all four labs, Avira Antivirus Pro is at the top, with 9.8 points.
Optimized Malware Scanning
I always advise running a full scan immediately after installing a new antivirus. After that initial cleaning, real-time protection should defend against any new attacks. For suspenders-and-belt protection, Trend Micro schedules a weekly quick scan. Tested on my clean virtual machine, the quick scan finished in less than four minutes.
You can tweak the day and time for the scheduled scan, and optionally make it a full scan. A full Trend Micro scan on my standard clean test system required 93 minutes, a bit more than the current average of 70 minutes.
Many antivirus products use that initial full scan to optimize for subsequent scans by flagging trusted files that don't need another scan. For example, a repeat scan with ESET NOD32 Antivirus finished in four minutes, down from 39 for the first scan. K7 took 48 minutes the first time around but finished a second scan in 10 minutes. Trend Micro completed a repeat scan in three minutes, quicker than the quick scan. It clearly benefits from optimization.
Uneven Malware Protection
Not every antivirus has plentiful lab results—in fact, quite a few aren’t tested by any of the big labs. I put every antivirus utility through my own hands-on malware protection tests both to capture another set of results and to get a feel for how the product does its job. In my tests, as in the lab tests, Trend Micro’s scores ranged from perfect to poor.
My basic malware protection test uses a folder of malware samples that I collected and analyzed myself. Like most antivirus tools, Trend Micro started picking these off as soon as I opened the folder. Most competing products detect 80% or more at this point. G Data Antivirus and ZoneAlarm wiped out 97% of these samples at this stage in their own latest tests. As for Trend Micro, it only eliminated 58% of the samples on sight. To be fair, some products, among them Avast Free Antivirus, McAfee, and Webroot, don’t even bother scanning programs on access, preferring to wait for attempted execution.
Continuing the test, I attempt to execute the samples that remain. That gives the antivirus a chance to exercise behavior-based detection and any other protective layers it has available. Trend Micro picked off more samples at this stage, for a total of 80% detection. A few slips like letting detected malware place executable files on the test system dragged its overall score down to 7.8 of 10 possible points, the lowest score among products tested with this set of samples. Coincidentally, when last tested nearly two years ago with a completely different sample set, Trend Micro scored just the same, 80% detection and 7.8 points.
Norton AntiVirus Plus has earned the best score among products tested with my latest malware collection, with 100% detection and 9.9 points. G Data and ZoneAlarm come close behind with 9.8 points, while McAfee and Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus took 9.7 points.
At one time, a Trend Micro reviewers’ guide stated that testing with samples more than a week old is not relevant to the real world. Given that it takes me four to five weeks to gather and analyze a new set of samples, there’s no way I could hit that one-week cutoff. In any case, competing products clearly have no trouble with the age of these samples.
I do have another test that gives a very up-to-the-minute view, more in line with the push for recent threats. I challenge each product with a collection of malware-hosting URLs discovered in the last few days by researchers at MRG-Effitas. I launch each URL in turn, noting whether the antivirus diverts the browser from the dangerous site, eliminates the malware download, or fails in its protective task. Skipping any URLs that are already defunct, I continue until I have 100 data points.
Trend Micro did almost all its work at the URL level. In most cases it displayed a big Malware Threat warning in the browser. It labeled a few as Dangerous Scam Page, and flagged a few others as Ransomware Threat. For a handful of files, it actively reported no threats found, permitting the downloads. Checking those files with VirusTotal after the test showed that they were indeed harmless.
With a perfect 100% score in this test, Trend Micro joins an elite crew. McAfee, Norton, Sophos Home Premium, and ZoneAlarm also reached 100% in their latest tests. Where Trend Micro blocked every attack at the URL level, ZoneAlarm did the opposite, using analysis of the malware payload in every case. Either way, it’s a win.
Impressive Protection Against Phishing
Malicious websites and downloads must run the gauntlet of multilayered antivirus detection to perpetrate their chicanery. Phishing websites have it easy by comparison. They only need to bamboozle hapless visitors into entering their login credentials. These frauds masquerade as sites that require a secure login, anything from financial sites to online gaming. If you enter your credentials, you've given away the valuables from that account, whether it's the money from your bank or that character you’ve been buffing for a year. You can learn to spot phishing frauds, but it's smart to use the automated phishing protection from your security software as backup.
Phishing sites typically get caught and blacklisted quickly, but if the fraudsters duped a few victims before the takedown, they don't care. They just pop up another fake and keep on trolling. For testing purposes, I scrape reported frauds from sites that track such things, making sure to include plenty that are too new for any blacklist. I launch each potential fraud in a browser protected solely by the antivirus under test and simultaneously in instances of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, relying just on the browser's built-in protection.
In the past, Trend Micro has done well against phishing frauds; this time, it totally aced the test. Along with Bitdefender, F-Secure Anti-Virus, McAfee, Norton, and ZoneAlarm, it scored a perfect 100%
Phishing is platform-agnostic—you can foolishly give away your password on any platform that has a browser. Phishing protection, however, can vary by platform. I tested Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac simultaneously with the Windows product and got the same perfect results, thankfully.
Multifaceted Ransomware Protection
Your antivirus should be able to fend off any known malware, and behavior-based detection can foil some unknowns. But for every new malware attack there’s a Patient Zero, the victim that gets hit before any other. Antivirus may not catch that zero-day exploit. Sure, an antivirus update will probably wipe out the attacker before too long. But if ransomware was involved, that still leaves your files hopelessly encrypted.
Because failing to prevent a ransomware attack is so serious, many antivirus companies have started adding protective layers focused solely on ransomware protection. Some defend your files against all unauthorized changes. Others watch for behaviors that suggest encrypting ransomware. Still others maintain encrypted backups of your most important files, for recovery after clearing up a ransomware threat. Trend Micro does a little of each.
You may remember that Trend Micro offered to enable Folder Shield during installation. If you skipped it then, be sure to turn it on later—reach it by clicking the Data icon on the main window.
Folder Shield prevents unauthorized programs from making any changes to your protected files. By default, it protects your Documents, and Pictures folders—you're free to add Desktop or other folders that are important to you. Trend Micro also protects files on USB drives, at least, while they're mounted, and files in your OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox folders (if present).
Folder Shield can't directly access folders belonging to accounts other than the one that's logged in, so each user account needs to set up Folder Shield separately. Once they’ve done so, you can see (but not change) settings for other users.
Folder Shield doesn't interfere when you edit protected files using a trusted program, but it warns when an unknown process tries to make any modifications to files in protected locations. If the program in question is legit, you can trust it with a click. But if you don't know why you got the warning, block that access! In case you're not around to see the warning, Trend Micro blocks unknowns automatically after a short while.
I used two hand-coded very-unknown programs to test Folder Shield, one of them a simple text editor and the other a super-simple ransomware emulator. It successfully prevented both from making any changes to files in the Documents folder.
I also tried configuring my ransomware emulator to launch at startup, because I've encountered a few ransomware protection systems that failed in that situation. Trend Micro correctly handled the emulator even at startup.
I like to test ransomware protection by turning off other layers of protection, to simulate an antivirus tool’s handling of zero-day ransomware. Unfortunately, turning off Trend Micro's real-time protection turns off everything, including the ransomware layer. I did manage a limited test using hand-modified versions of my ransomware samples. Trend Micro wiped out most of these on sight but left four behind. When I launched the survivors, it caught them all, naming two ransomware and the other two suspicious.
I also ran the RanSim ransomware simulator from KnowBe4. I had to trust the main program and restore its launcher and data collection processes from quarantine, else I couldn't run the test at all. RanSim launches 10 scenarios simulating ransomware activity and two simulating legitimate crypto utilities. The best score, of course, involves blocking the 10 simulated nasties and leaving the two innocuous ones alone. Trend Micro blocked all 12. In a real-world situation where it offers to block a legitimate crypto app, you simply tell it to trust the program.
Besides blocking unauthorized access to sensitive files and detecting ransomware-like behavior, Trend Micro keeps a secure backup of all protected files. If ransomware does manage to encrypt some of these before the antivirus kills it, the Damage Recovery Engine restores those files from backup. Since none of my available samples could get past the other defenses, I had no way to see this feature in action.
See How We Test Security Software
More From Trend Micro Toolbar
Trend Micro’s browser toolbar (for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox) powers the very effective Web Threat Protection feature. This component took Trend Micro to 100% detection both in my phishing protection test and my malicious download test. However, there’s more to the toolbar. Clicking its icon, you see five items: Web Threat Protection, Email Defender, Ad Block, Pay Guard, and Password Manager.
Web Threat Protection also helps you avoid clicking on dangerous links in the first place. A green icon and highlight means that all's well—if it’s red or yellow, don't click! You can also set the extension to rate links on mouseover. Now if you hover the mouse over any link, on any page, Trend Micro will double-check it for you.
Email Defender, formerly called Fraud Buster, integrates with your Gmail.com or Outlook.com email account to protect against “scams and phishing attacks.” To perform this service, it necessarily sends all your mail to Trend Micro for analysis. I don’t like the sound of that, so I didn’t enable it.
As expected, the Ad Blocker suppresses advertisements on the web pages you visit. A number overlaid on the toolbar button lets you know how many ads it blocked on the current page. When you click to open the feature, you don’t get details about blocked ads, but you can turn blocking on and off, either for the current site or globally.
Trend Micro's Pay Guard isolates your browser from possible attack, to protect your financial transactions online. It's a lot like Banking and Payment Protection in ESET, though it uses a sky-blue border instead of green to identify the protected browser, and it puts its banner at the bottom of the window instead of in the title bar.
Kaspersky offers a similar feature, while Bitdefender puts the protected browser in a separate desktop. Pay Guard is meant to offer protection automatically when you visit a financial site, and it worked for most sites in my testing. If you don't see the blue border, just launch PayGuard manually from the browser toolbar before banking online. Note that to configure Pay Guard you’ll need to click the Privacy icon in the main window.
That leaves the final item, Password Manager. Leave this one alone. PCMag’s Kim Key has put Trend Micro Password Manager through a thorough evaluation and found it sorely lacking. It’s a free product, in any case, so there’s no bonus from receiving it as a suite feature. If you need password management at no cost, there are plenty of better free password managers.
Still More Bonus Features
The bonus features don’t end with the browser toolbar, but some are easier to find than others. Mute Mode will find you if you launch a full-screen program. It works like the gamer mode in other products, suppressing interruptions so you don’t drop frames because of a background scan, or get fragged because the antivirus proudly announced a successful update.
You can also invoke Mute Mode as needed from the system tray menu. When you do so, you can set a time for it to turn off, have it suspend Windows Update while active, and even terminate specific other programs that might get in the way. For fine-grained control, you can set each program to terminate when invoking Mute Mode manually, automatically, or both.
On the Privacy page, along with Pay Guard, you’ll find the option to enable Social Networking Protection. This extends the color-coded link markup feature to "most popular social networking sites." According to Trend Micro, these are Facebook, LinkedIn, Mixi, MySpace, Pinterest, Twitter, and Weibo. So, it includes MySpace and Mixi, but leaves out Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok? This feature has been sadly in need of an update for years.
Note that this link analysis is unrelated to the Check Social Network Privacy feature found in the macOS edition and in Trend Micro's suite products. That feature actively examines your privacy settings and recommends changes if necessary.
Fewer and fewer users need a local spam filter, given the prevalence of webmail services that handle spam automatically. Buried in Settings, Trend Micro’s spam filter works strictly with Outlook, and all settings except the on/off switch are embedded in its Outlook add-on. My test systems don’t have Outlook, so I couldn’t see this limited component at all.
Also in the settings, on the Network page, you’ll find a feature called Firewall Booster. Trend Micro relies on the sturdy Windows Firewall for all typical firewall tasks. The booster component specifically adds protection against botnet-related attacks. It can also optionally display a warning when you connect to a non-secured wireless network.
Beyond what you can see, Trend Micro Antivirus comes with quite a collection of invisible enhancements. It includes special protection against coin-mining malware, file-less malware, and tech support scams. An artificial intelligence component adapts to new malware and new conditions. Alas, I couldn't tease these components into taking any visible action, but I’m sure they're in there.
Beyond Antivirus
Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security earns excellent scores in our malicious URL blocking and antiphishing tests, but fares poorly in our hands-on malware protection test. It also gets a range of scores from excellent to dismal in independent lab tests. Its multilayered ransomware protection is hard to test, but seems to work. Browser protection for financial transactions, ad blocking, and spam filtering are among the many bonus features that justify the plus in this product’s name. Remember, too, that there's no volume discount. If you need to protect multiple devices, you'll have to upgrade to a Trend Micro suite, or choose a different antivirus.
Which different antivirus should you choose? The labs routinely award top scores to Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, and it boasts a collection of features to rival Trend Micro. One subscription to McAfee AntiVirus Plus protects all your devices, whether they run Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS. And Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus, which also offers strong ransomware protection, is the smallest and lightest antivirus we've seen. These remain our Editors' Choice products for antivirus protection.
In addition to malware protection for one Windows computer, Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security offers layered protection against ransomware, a firewall booster, protection for online banking, and more. However, it earns both excellent and dreadful scores in lab tests and our own tests.
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