Trend speeds up AV scans

Users should not be offered stronger security but smarter security. That's the message from Trend Micro, the hosted security software company as it released the latest version of its Internet Security suite.

Keith Reed, the company's EMEA eCommerce Director said that too many security vendors had focused on stronger security but Reed said that that should be a given.

The company caused some stir earlier this month when it suggested that customers shouldn't be buying anti-virus products, a strange statement for an anti-virus company to be making, but an approach that was endorsed by Reed.

Reed said that the new version of the product offered a much more efficient user experience. "We're talking about 74 percent less kernel memory and 45 less boot time," he said. He also said that the product offered a higher level of parental controls than previous versions had provided.

There are other features offered by the new version that Reed claimed gave Trend Micro an edge over much of the competition. "For example, " said Reed, "we offer users a genuine QuickScan. That means that it does system directory and root directory scans, very different from what other vendors do. There are many vendors who claim to do QuickScans but they're not real and the value of some of them is questionable."

Another new feature that Reed was keen to talk about was the way that the product is source-aware. "It could be that you're working on something that's resource intensive, like gaming on a full-screen, then the software is aware of this and works in the background until you're finished," added Reed.

The new product also offers improved smartphone handling to take into account the rise in mobile web traffic. "According to one survey, the new iPhone has led to a 32 percent increase in mobile web traffic in just eight weeks," said Reed. He pointed out that although there's more awareness of the potential for using mobiles to access the web, users were lagging behind in their understanding of the underlying security threats.

The final features that Reed drew attention to were the ability to prevent identity theft through keystroke logging through 128-bit encryption. "We did some research on 175,000 users and found that two percent of them had some sort of keylogger on their system - two percent doesn't sound like very much but that's an awful lot of machines." He also pointed out a remote file lock that would protect sensitive files in case a PC was stolen.