Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014

Pros Excellent score in malware-blocking test. Impressive blocking of malicious URLs. Accurate antiphishing and antispam protection. Bonus firewall booster blocked many exploit attacks.

Cons Installation on some malware-infested test systems required hours of remote-control support. Good-not-great score in hands-on malware cleanup test. Behavior-based detection suspects or even quarantines valid programs. Bottom Line Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014 focuses on resisting the very newest malware attacks, and does a good job. Its behavior-based detection can be over-enthusiastic, but it offers accurate phishing and spam protection and a firewall booster that can block exploit attacks.

By Neil J. Rubenking

We all agree that "antivirus" these days refers to a product that protects against all kinds of malicious software, not just viruses. But should it do even more than that? The folks at Trend Micro want to offer full-scale security protection even in their entry-level product, so Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014 ($39.95 direct) adds spam filtering and a firewall booster, as well as an impressive antiphishing component.

The product's sparse main window uses one extra-large icon to show current security status; if it's anything but fully protected, you can click a button to fix the problem. From the mini-toolbar you can launch a scan, open the settings dialog, or check protection statistics. A second page titled "PC/Mobile" lets you create a rescue disk or launch a trial of Trend Micro's mobile protection.

The main window features a button bar at top and status bar at bottom in bold black and red. In between, in the main body of the window, you can swap in one of eight supplied background images. Clouds, fields, flowers, psychedelic patterns—the choices are quite varied. Don't like any of them? You can use your own picture!

Focus on Dynamic Testing
Trend Micro pulled out of Virus Bulletin's VB100 testing some years ago, on the basis that testing against a static malware collection just isn't relevant. They also don't participate in testing by ICSA Labs or West Coast Labs. The reviewer's guide for this product touts its ability to block zero-day threats, and indeed it received the top rating, ADVANCED+, in the grueling real-world protection test by AV-Comparatives.

AV-Comparatives does also run an on-demand detection test, but it's not precisely a static test. Each antivirus product gets a chance to scan and wipe out known malware, true, but the researchers also launch any samples that survive, giving the antivirus a chance to use behavioral detection and other dynamic technologies. Trend Micro passed this test with a STANDARD rating. Note that my own malware blocking test works in a very similar fashion.

German lab AV-Test evaluates products using a combination of static and dynamic tests. Each product can earn up to six points for Protection, Performance, and Usability. Trend Micro averaged 14.8 of 18 possible points in the most recent two tests.

Trend Micro's scores are good, but Bitdefender and Kaspersky participate in all of the lab tests that I follow and routinely earn top scores. For more about the labs and their testing methods, see How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.

Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014 lab tests chart

Mixed Installation Experience
Trend Micro installed without incident on nine of my twelve malware-infested test systems. To get past ransomware that blocks desktop access in another system, tech support recommended Trend's advanced bootable USB solution. It proved incompatible with my virtual machine configuration, but their old-school text-only Rescue CD totally solved my ransomware problem.

The remaining two systems caused me a lot of grief. On advice from tech support, I used the Trend Micro Anti-Threat Toolkit and several other in-house tools. Eventually, though, I had to turn over these systems for remote diagnosis and cleaning by a tech support agent, which took hours but ended in success for both systems.

An antivirus that installs on all twelve systems with little or no hassle displays a five-star installation experience. If all problems can be solved by applying a rescue CD or other ancillary tool, that's still good for four stars. When getting the product installed drags on into hours of remote control, that's not a great installation experience. Like Norton AntiVirus (2014), AVG Anti-Virus FREE 2014, and quite a few others, Trend Micro gets two stars for installation experience.

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