The Winds of Change in Malware Management

Some of you may know that we’ve become increasingly unimpressed with the anti-malware software that we’ve been recommending to customers for the last six years.  A six-week turnaround between our discovery of a new virus on a customer’s computer and its addition to the virus-detection-and-removal database of world’s largest anti-malware software producer sealed the deal.  We had to find a better solution for malware protection. 

Unfortunately the problems with anti-malware software are not unique to one product.  According to CIO magazine, the effectiveness of even the top-performing anti-malware software on the market has fallen significantly.  In tests performed during the third quarter of 2009, Trend Micro’s product, the top performer in the market, blocked the execution of 96.4 percent of malware it was exposed to.  During the same period this year, it only blocked 90.1 percent.  In other words nearly one in ten pieces of malware thrown at the best product on the market were not detected or blocked.  Still Trend Micro’s product outperformed the product we were recommending by a large margin.  Our recommended product was only catching 72.3 percent of the malware it was exposed to.¹

Armed with a substantial requirements list, we began evaluating anti-malware products in hopes that we would find a product that was easy for us to manage while also detecting and destroying nearly all malware.  The product that met nearly all of our requirements and had the best scores in malware blocking was from—you guessed it—Trend Micro. 

We’ve chosen to recommend Trend Micro’s Worry-Free Business Security (WFBS) product to our customers.  Not only does their engine detect and block more malware than the others, they also have new and innovative ways to minimize the impact of the scanning process on computers.  All malware scanners consume system resources and slow down computing systems to some extent.  We have high hopes that Trend Micro’s technology will provide the least-intrusive scanning mechanism while providing the best malware blocking available. 

Trend Micro also has a sophisticated web-reputation service that comes with WFBS.  This system scans the Internet for web sites that distribute harmful content, and allows administrators to block access to those websites.  If we can block access to the websites where malware originates, we stand a much better chance of preventing infection on client computers. 

We welcome Trend Micro to our team, and we hope our partnership with them will be beneficial to our customer base.  We’ll be installing this product at our offices as well as select customer sites over the next couple of months.  Keep tuned in right here to find out how it goes.

¹ Source: Tests Show Consumer Antivirus Programs Falling Behind, CXO Media Inc., Retrieved November 23, 2010