Trend Micro is a newcomer to the A-List, and Titanium is a new brand. It was one of only a few suites this month to achieve a perfect malware detection score, protecting us against 100% of our threats, as well as correctly giving the green light to every one of our legitimate applications.
It isn’t a perfect piece of software. In our firewall tests, Titanium Internet Security 2011 sat silently as the attacking computer extracted details of network shares, running services, installed software and open ports.
It even allowed access to a TCP port known to be used by trojans, although we dare say it would have made a noise if an actual trojan had been present.
As with Trend Micro’s 2010 suite, Titanium is also only an average performer in terms of resource usage. We measured a RAM footprint of 121MB – more than twice the memory Eset’s package requires. Although Titanium added only a single second to boot-time, it continued initialising for eight more seconds after that.
The secondary features are perfectly good, but they won’t be of interest to everyone. The spam filter and email scanner are useful if you use a desktop mail client. The parental controls let you restrict web browsing on a per-user basis, but don’t offer anything that can’t be had for free via Windows Family Safety.
Finally, data theft protection prevents certain information from being sent from your computer, except to authorised destinations. You can ensure your credit card details can’t go anywhere except to approved online retailers, for example. It’s a neat idea, but a chore if you deal with lots of websites.
Despite these caveats, Titanium Internet Security 2011 takes the crown for three simple reasons – that impeccable real-world protection, a clearly labelled and logically arranged interface, and the price. When you consider its excellent protection and usability, it’s a bargain.
