Competitive Benchmarks

Accurate benchmarking of security solutions is critical to users’ decision making. Today, many third-party tests show composite scores that do not allow the user to identify where in the kill chain the protection is provided. As such, Trend Micro has been advocating for a more detailed approach to testing in the industry, that is, to break out the different layers of these tests and thereby identify effectiveness at each layer.

Why exposure layer matters

A single malicious server may serve up an infinite number of malicious files during its lifetime. As such, blocking the source of infection is a far better option than waiting to identify each file served up by the server at the endpoint. By blocking the source of the infection using IP, Domain and Web Reputation technologies benefits the user in a number of ways:

• All malicious files served up by the infection source are blocked
• Files are not downloaded to the device, thereby preserving bandwidth
• Files are not scanned on the device, thereby preserving computing resources
   

To highlight the differences between many of our industry competitors, we look at results (PDF) recently published by independent testing lab, Veszprog. Among the battery of tests Veszprog performs are endpoint exposure (V-7A) and infection layer (V7-B) tests.

In the first test, Trend Micro blocks three quarters of the threats at their source–the URL–whereas our competitors only block on average one quarter of the threats (figure 1). Test V-7B shows where our competitors focus their threat protection today–on the endpoint. Trend Micro increases detection 10% beyond that of the exposure layer, whereas the average from the competitive products added 42% detection (figure 2).

This means instead of blocking the malware at its source, these competitors rely on on-device scanning techniques (signature, heuristics, behavior scanning) to identify most of the threats. This is a key differentiator in the ability to protect customers from new threats as well as minimizing the impact on resources for customer’s devices.

Additionally, Veszprog’s tests on browser exploits and phishing, V-6 and V-8, showcase Trend Micro’s leadership in blocking at the infection layer.

Global threat intelligence derived from our cloud-based detection and correlation technologies, and custom data mining tools, allows us to respond to today’s volume, variety, and velocity of threats efficiently and effectively.

Trend Micro was the top performer in PC Security Labs' unique assessment of endpoint security products for Windows 8. They evaluated five vendors against Microsoft's free Windows Defender and rated their effectiveness based on user type. Read the March 2013 report (PDF)

Trend Micro was the top-rated company in the September 2012 AV-Comparatives “Whole Product Dynamic Real World Protection Test"

Source: AV-Comparatives

Exploits

The mission of endpoint protection is to defend users against exploits and malware when a patch is not available or has not yet been applied. NSS Labs conducted tests on 13 popular consumer antivirus products, to see how well they repelled attacks on systems not yet patched for the CVE-2012-1875 and CVE-2012-1889 Microsoft vulnerabilities uncovered in June and July 2012.

Trend Micro was one of only 4 of the 13 products to block all attacks. According to NSS Labs, “Exploit prevention remains a challenge for most products.”

Source: NSS Labs

For three consecutive quarters, Trend Micro has ranked first in Opus One anti-spam tests against eight leading security vendors including Barracuda Networks, Cisco, Google, McAfee, Microsoft, Proofpoint, Sophos, and Symantec.

Opus One’s methodology relies on actual corporate mail streams, manually analyzed for threats, providing significant real-world results, unlike results obtained through automated tests based on artificial mail streams.

The smartphone has become a universal tool valued for its productivity and fun factor but hated for the problems it can bring. Malware targeting Google’s Android platform increased nearly sixfold in the third quarter of 2012. What had been around 30,000 malicious and potentially dangerous or high-risk Android apps in June increased to almost 175,000 between July and September, and the number of malicious and high-risk Android apps is expected to reach at least 350,000 by the end of 2012.

In AV-Test's November 2012 benchmarking of 25 mobile security solutions, Trend Micro Mobile Security Personal Edition excelled. Trend Micro Mobile Security rated high in both Android malware detection and potentially unwanted programs.