provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.comWe're all very much past the point of no return in integrating the Web as a daily part of our lives and, most dangerously, the workplace. With threats erupting from even the most innocuous of sources, and the lack of enough hours in the day to keep up with them all, it seems like a good time to consider a product like Trend Micro's Internet Security Pro to provide you with that extra few layers of protection.
The software is aimed at the home office and mobile crowd, tossing in the now nearly standard three PC license, a licensing scheme that goes a ways to improving its value for your money. And what you get for your purchase is quite a bit more than the usual spyware and anti-virus scanners.
It piles on the added protection with a two-way firewall that's undoubtedly tied to its parental controls feature and wireless network protection, which prevents unauthorized users on the same Wi-Fi network you're on from accessing your PC. As for the laptop-bound crowd, the Transaction Protector component hosts a Wi-Fi Advisor that judges whether a network is safe to connect to and a keyboard data entry encryption application should there be keyloggers lurking around.
Trend Micro also conveniently inserts a system tuner for clearing out the cookies and histories you accumulate browsing the Web and a rather handy Remote File Lock for password secured storage when you're away from your PC or, should the unthinkable happen, your computer is stolen.
That's a Whole Lot to Ask
Installing Internet Security Pro might just set you off on the wrong foot as it'll politely inform you that it works better without Lavasoft's Ad-Aware on your PC - at all - and prompts its uninstall routine to run. Real-time scanners can conflict with one other but there's still plenty of value in keeping them around as independent, on-demand scanners.
Microsoft's Windows Defender and built-in firewall aren't welcome to the party either and the application informs you it's best to disable them, which is somewhat acceptable. It would appear that the suite wants to shoulder all of the burden.
Getting around the different functions is a breeze with its simple to navigate main console. The features are grouped where you'd expect to find them and there's no right-clicking for extra added settings to be found, which is a mainstay with many applications.
As for the meat and potatoes of any security product, the included anti-virus and malware protection passed the cursory tests with flying colors although it's to be expected given the company's background handling such threats. Its firewall and parental controls, on the other hand, could use a bit of work.
The test system didn't give itself away to repeated port scans, preferring instead the good old "play dead" routine to keep the hounds at bay. While it handled that well enough, outbound connections were a mixed bag with a proper notification box popping up for any application attempting to access the Web. However, embedded video and flash files, which launch browser-based plug-ins, failed to show any such warning. So if you implicitly trust your Web browser you had better trust its plugins.
Page 2: There's Work to Be Done
There's Work to be Done
There are a similar batch of inconsistencies with the program's Parental Controls or more aptly named "no you can't do that" feature.
The asterisk is your friend here as explicitly banning a domain won't block a subdomain from loading, which isn't as bad the program allowing the use of an IP address to access a banned domain. The two "faults" could easily be remedied with a few recommendations from the program on how to properly block a website, and as for the IP address, a simple DNS resolve wouldn't be something out of the ordinary.
A bit of extra work to keep things secure shouldn't dissuade you from taking a look at this program. Some of its advanced features prove quite useful, such as Keystroke Encryption that blocks keyloggers from taking a peek at what you're entering into Web forms. It's limited to Internet Explorer and it won't block URLs you've typed into your address bar or terms entered into the search bar from being intercepted, but it did prevent the test keylogging software from picking up the data entered into a number of forms.
That brings up an interesting question on how exactly a keylogger was allowed to run on the test system at all. Still, it did make a good effort at preventing me from viewing webpages devoted to keylogging software. In short it's a nice enough feature to have but you'll want to keep tabs on who has access to your machines and their intentions.
A look at the Data Theft Prevention feature shows a handy list to plug in partial bits of important information that you don't want to leak out of your PC, by any means. This can include credit card numbers, names, or you can plug in your own categories and expand on the data you want to exclude from being able to send.
It works quite well spitting out warnings when attempting to send out emails or Web forms with information on the banned list although it doesn't appear to cover all common chat programs or protocols, not that it claims to. For instance, it did allow Trillian to send "banned" words, the same with IRC (Internet Relay Chat), which given the feature's self-appointed protector title, seems a bit counter-intuitive.
The Break Down
Trend Micro's Internet Security Pro fights the good fight on many a front and if you can get past some glaring sticking points you'll find a suite that has a solid feature set and can handle most threats well enough.
Its gaps in protection aren't all that glaring but the issues that sprang up - issues shared with other security suites to be fair - proves that you can't be reliant on a single tool set to keep yourself safe. This makes the program's insistence on handling all your needs without interference all the more jarring.
Overall it's worthy of that Pro tag they slapped on to the end but we're not yet at that stage where you can put your full trust into a single piece of software. That said, maintaining a good set of PC security procedures is still in your best interest.
Trend Micro Internet Security Pro:
Availability: Now at http://www.trendmicro.com
Pricing: $69.95 3 User Licenses, Includes 1 year of updates, additional 1 year renewal $49.95, multiple year discounts are offered.
System Requirements: 350MB storage space, additional 1GB needed for Total Recovery; Microsoft Windows XP SP2 or Vista 32/64bit; 1GHz Pentium CPU Recommended for Vista, 450MHz for Windows XP; 512MB of memory recommended for XP, 1GB of memory recommended for Vista.
Go to page: Prev 1 2
This article was first published on EnterpriseITPlanet.com.
Author: Rafael Hernandez
Read article at Internet.com site