With the prevalence of Net connections and all the good things a connected society brings such as community, the ability to share ideas and the openness of information, comes the flipside of digital life -- hackers, spyware, viruses and spam. If you've got a Net connection or are thinking of connecting to the Net, and you're not protected against these things, then you need to get something, and quick.
Much like Norton Internet Security 2004 (November 2003, page 55), Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security 2004 comes with everything you need to give yourself a head start without having to fork over money for disparate programs. Broken into three main sub-sections, PC-cillin Internet Security 2004 comes with an anti-virus scanner, a spam filter and a personal firewall, and for those with wireless connectivity it comes with a forth -- wireless protection.
It's quite a thorough program, although it did require multiple boots to install -- once after installation, and immediately again after updating the software from Trend Micro's site.
The personal firewall is enabled out of the box, although if you want to go the whole hog you have to enable URL filtering, privacy data protection and anti-spam yourself. The firewall functions can be managed from basic functionality (just move a slider to low, medium and high security levels) to being able to select what ports are excepted.
The URL filtering option is also quite basic, and is based either on black or white lists which you have to compile yourself. That makes it a surprisingly time consuming enterprise so it's only recommended for the most diligent of surfers (however it will intelligently scour your browser history and import from there, so if you're a limited surfer you might find this option handy).
The anti-spam option, like the firewall, comes with a slider for three security levels -- low, medium and high. There's also a whitelist option for allowed email addresses but each and every one must be entered manually -- there's no way to import addresses from another program, say from Outlook. That said, you can specify entire email domains to cover whole swathes of addresses at once, but this can leave your inbox vulnerable.
The anti-virus options in Internet Security 2004 are by far the strongest of the lot, with email scanning set by default by the installation as well as periodic scans. You can configure scanning levels and options for both offline scans and real-time scanning, and we were pleased with the speed at which the anti-virus portion was able to scan our test system. An added bonus is that the real-time scanner keeps an eye out for insidious spyware applications -- one of the increasing annoyances of surfing the web.
It's a fairly basic set of software tools, but for the security and peace-of-mind it offers you really can't do better. And while the software's configuration is quite basic and limiting, and may frustrate the more advanced user, it does come with some solid event logging tools so you can really begin to micro-manage your system as much as Internet Security 2004 will allow.