Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2013 review

Trend Micro's anti-malware suites have historically done very well in our tests and Titanium Internet Security’s performance wasn't exactly poor this time. However, as our test system was compromised by 6 per cent of the malicious programs it was exposed to, it's not in the top flight of this year's tested security suites.

Nonetheless, it completely blocked 91 per cent of viruses and eradicated another 3 per cent after they'd got on to our system, putting it just above AVG Internet Security 2013. Trend didn't do too well in our false positive tests, though. We tried to install 100 benign programs and it blocked eight of them - the worst performance we've seen. This gave it an overall total accuracy rating of 322.5.

To its credit, Trend has included plenty of useful extra features with Internet Security. The first time it launches, you're presented with a pop-up to inform you that your subscription includes Trend's Android and Mac OS X security products, too. While the Android version is free, each Mac install requires one of your licences.

From the main screen, the Overview tab shows whether you're currently protected or not, along with some extra information about recently stopped threats and the status of the program's Facebook Privacy Scanner and Social Networking Protection modules. There are also buttons to start a manual scan, change scan settings, and access the program's advanced configuration options.

If Trend has blocked a program that you're sure is safe and want to use, the Security Summary window also allows you to restore the quarantined software, although we found that in some cases, different elements of a program were blocked individually, requiring us to go through and unblock each of them as we attempted to install the software.

The Security Summary shows you a graph view of all the different threats Trend has detected - clicking into each type takes you to the Logs screen, which is where you can actually restore or completely remove detected threats. We'd have preferred a direct link to the Logs from Trend's Overview page, as they're far more useful than the summary graphs.

The Facebook Privacy Scanner and Social Networking Protection are features of the Trend Micro Toolbar, a browser plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. The Facebook Privacy Scanner tells you how much information your account reveals to other users, while Social Networking protection checks the links shared on a variety of social networks and flags up potential threats.

The PC/Mobile tab provides you with permanent links that you can use to download the Mac and Android security software, along with a link to download an installer to create a bootable rescue CD or USB stick. There's also a system tuner, designed to clear junk off your PC, remove incriminating messenger and browser logs and generally optimise your computer's performance.

There's also a button marked PC & Internet Security, which actually takes you to the advanced settings for Trend's virus detection and internet security modules. These settings are useful and we'd have preferred to be more clearly marked and available from Trend's main overview page. You can change the default scheduling of scans, add exceptions to scanning and security, make the software more sensitive to potentially risky applications and activate Trend's Firewall Booster, which aims to make Windows' own firewall more effective against threats such as botnet clients.