Trend Micro Internet Security 2009 Pro: Photos

There has been a movement towards faster, less intrusive internet security suites in the diverse range of 2009 offerings. Physical installation of Trend Micro Internet Security 2009 is certainly fast, although several update and registration steps are slower.

The suite requires 100MB of disk space, more than stand-alone antivirus, which Trend Micro does not recommend you buy.

This is the slowest stage of the installation, which in all takes several minutes.

Installation requires you to create an account using an active email address.

As the description suggests, the account allows you to retrieve "lost serial numbers" along with other functions. Notice that the "Receive the latest offers and news from Trend Micro" box is ticked by default.

Upon installation the Trend Micro requires you to download the latest updates and signatures. This gave a total file size of close to 22MB.

Trend Micro Internet Security Pro 2009 has a fairly simple menu that allows to you progressively "drill down" for increasing configuration options.

This is an example of one of its intermediate menus, that allows you to set the strength of your firewall between "minimum" and "maximum".

This is a section of the advanced menu, allowing you granular control over what you block using Trend Micro's firewall.

One interesting feature of Internet Security Pro 2009 is parental control, which allows you to block a diverse range of content. Different levels of access control can be set up for different users via an administrator account, which requires a password.

Here are some examples of the content that can be blocked using parental control, which includes information on the "occult", information that pertains to "gay and lesbian" issues and information that relates to "racism" and hate crimes. There is also the usual sex, violence, drugs, crime and hacking content filters. Parental controls can be set from strong to weak, with ages ranging from "child" to "mature teen".

We put the filter to the test in the next slide.

We weren't willing to look for violent or pornographic material that might slip through the filter, so we decided to test some of its more unusual filtering abilities. Here we turned the parental filtering to maximum and then went looking for information on witchcraft and the occult.

Nope, no Wicca for us today. Trend Micro says no.

Interestingly however, the filter allows us to access the Wikipedia page on witchcraft. This commends the filter to us, as it's filtering information based on its factual credibility.

Precise control of what your internet security suite is doing on your computer is important. This it Trend Micro's scanning control panel, allowing you to specify if you want your entire computer scanned, or just a specific file or folder. The suite also offers the option of scanning compressed files.

There are a range of other interesting additions that come with Trend Micro 2009, including remote file lock.

One curious, but interesting addition is the option of a security protection for mobiles. There have been few reports of mobile malware, but several security vendors are offering mobile security including Trend Micro rival Symantec.

Trying to get hold of the Trend Micro's mobile security software directs you to a Web page that asks for your mobile number.