Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac Review

Full review

Trend Micro, perhaps not the best-known name in virus protection, is a subsidiary of the Japanese firm Trend Micro, Inc. Founded in 1988 in the US, the company has been offering antivirus solutions for PCs since its inception. Known for its expertise in cloud security, Trend Micro offers this Mac anti-virus solution to protect your machine against malware, phishing, and identity theft. It gives you tools to control your children’s internet use, too.

Protection

The malware protection program blocks a range of threats including spyware, viruses, rootkits and image spam. As well as providing the cover needed to protect Macs from viruses (although there is no mention of protecting against Windows viruses), the program also includes a means of alerting you to phishing attempts through fake websites. The websites returned in a search result have information attached to them relating to their trustworthiness or their suspected bad intentions and the software blocks you from opening dangerous sites. As protection against identity theft, Trend Micro detects spam emails that attempt to phish for personal information. The social media scanning system checks online accounts for any aspects that may be dangerous to your online security and also looks out for links in your feed that could cause problems.

Effectiveness

[Awaiting copy.]

Scans & updates

Choose from a Full Scan of the entire Mac to look for any kind of threat, a Smart Scan that targets the places malware is most likely to affect, and a Custom Scan where you specify which files and folders you want to investigate. We like the solid real-time protection that looks after the Mac, constantly checking for new threats and blocking anything that could harm your security. We also like the ability to schedule scans for set times on a weekly, monthly or daily basis.

Features

You can choose from three levels of protection online – from the lowest security rating which blocks only the known dangers, to the highest setting that alerts you to websites that are even only slightly suspect. The highest settings are recommended for children using the computer and act as a parental control meaning it is less likely kids will access dangerous websites or reveal personal info online. In addition, you can add specific websites to a blacklist or a whitelist. Or, if you prefer to work by categories, you can set categories of sites that you want restricted including things like drugs, and violence. The parental control features are also useful because they allow you to limit children’s time online and also see where they went and what they accessed when they were on the computer.

Ease of use

Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac is clean and simple to navigate. The "Quick Start Guide" is particularly useful - it guides you through the install process so you are up and running in just a few minutes. The interface includes your options for scanning along with the real-time scanning status updates. There is also a good degree of flexibility when you want to configure the anti-virus scans to your liking. You can choose what the program does when it encounters a threat, from giving all decision-making control to the software, to performing only actions decided by you.

Help & support

An online selection of common issues, questions and solutions helps you to find what you are looking for when you want help deciphering a notification or the program is not running smoothly. There are lots of free tools available and many articles and blog posts to help you become better informed about the product and about online security. If nothing helps, you can chat with a technical support engineer with little wait time, or email and hear back within 24 to 48 hours. The Standard Support telephone line is open during the day.

Overall

Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac is not our top-rated anti-virus protector because it simply does not protect against malware as effectively as other solutions. But with its anti-phishing features, its good parental control settings, and its email link scanning protection, it is a decent protector for your Mac online.