Trend Micro Worry-Free Services Advanced

Trend Micro Worry-Free Advanced has changed not only its name this time around, but also its feature set and its price. Overall, it's a good choice for smaller companies that have deep pockets and don't need patch management or mobile device management (MDM). Still, some performance issues and the lack of patch management keep it behind our endpoint protection Editors' Choice winners, Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra, Sophos Intercept X, and F-Secure Elements.

Trend Micro Worry-Free Pricing and Plans

While the product has a deeper feature set than the last time we reviewed it, Trend Micro has also raised its price. In our last review, the platform cost around $37.75 per user per year, while this latest version goes for $59.87 per user per year. That places it among the priciest products we saw this time around, even though we only tested the second pricing tier, which adds email protection on top of basic endpoint coverage. Beyond this, Trend Micro also offers Worry-Free XDR and Worry-Free with Managed XDR Services. Unfortunately, the company doesn't disclose pricing for those tiers without contacting a sales rep, so get set for some haggling.

Compared to the other offerings we reviewed, Trend Micro is priced well above Editors' Choice winner Sophos Intercept X, but it's in line with Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra. Bitdefender also provides more feature value for the buck, yet these advanced features will appeal more to larger organizations than the small business customer Trend Micro seems most interested in. Even in that class, however, it's competitive with other small business platforms, like Avast or Kaspersky.

Getting Started

The basic Worry-Free tier supports endpoint protection for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. We tested the next step up, Worry-Free Services Advanced, which adds email, cloud storage, and Microsoft 365 protection. The more advanced tiers add XDR features, which frankly we'd have liked to have seen in the version we tested, considering its price.

When you login to Trend Micro Worry-Free Services Advanced, the first thing you'll see is a newly redesigned interface. The dashboard makes identifying detections simple. It’s broken down at the top by known threats, unknown threats, and policy violations. Getting details on these is a simple drill-down click. Below this, infections are broken down by channel. This includes web, cloud synchronization, email, removable storage, or local drive. There is also a quick heads-up on which security agents are online and need updating. Overall, we felt Trend Micro's new dashboard shows everything you need to see at a glance, which is a significant improvement over previous iterations.

Before you get any meaningful data, though, you’ll need to add some devices and find some threats to detect. To do this, you can add agents from the security agents page. It gives you the option to download an installer, install on the endpoint you are logged in with, or send an installer link. The last option is mainly for Android, iOS, and Chromebook devices (for which it provides a browser extension). Once you add a device, it will show up in the group you selected during the agent install.

If you check the box next to one or more of the devices, you can perform updates on the device, or encrypt and decrypt its storage using whichever native software is available: BitLocker for Windows or File Vault for macOS. In addition, you can set up and apply policies per group. This is a nice feature since travelers and remote workers will often require a different level of latitude than well-controlled desktop PCs that never leave the office. Likewise, servers will have a higher level of scrutiny, since they tend to be grand prizes for cyber-attacks. We enabled all the behavior-monitoring options for all our tests for all devices.

The Scans tab gives some options for setting up manual and scheduled scans. Missing from this version is any kind of patch management or vulnerability scan. This was a disappointment, considering the other significant advances that Trend Micro Worry-Free Services has made in the current version. These features are also available in nearly every other product we tested.

Another feature of Worry-Free is its bundled firewall, which includes a built-in intrusion detection system. This can automatically detect and block a range of well-known intrusion methods, such as SYN Floods, Ping of Death, Teardrop, and so on. The rules for these come preconfigured, saving admins some headaches.

Reporting and Threat Analysis

The Reports tab offers a variety of report content that you can view online, download as a PDF, or send to an email address. You can schedule weekly or monthly reports, and for a specific date range. For the source of the reports, you can choose either all devices or a specific group, so it’s easy to break things out by servers, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. The content of the report is both informative and well-organized.

New to this version is enhanced threat analysis, which is available for every detection. Clicking on it brings you to a window that shows the path of the infection from start to finish. While the Advanced tier doesn’t offer true EDR or XDR, you can get that level of functionality if you upgrade to the XDR or Managed XDR license. It’s a bit disappointing that this is extra, but this type of upselling is typical for the product category.

Also new is support for two-factor authentication, a welcome feature that's now offered by most products in this category and has become a security best practice.

Testing Performance

As with the other candidates in our round-up, we ran Trend Micro Worry-Free through our endpoint protection testing suite.

We started by testing its phishing capabilities. Although Trend Micro requires a plugin for this feature, it's fortunately installed automatically. Not long after the install, we were notified that we needed to restart Chrome to ensure that the plugin was enabled. For the test, we selected ten known phishing pages from PhishTank, a collection of suspected and verified phishing websites. Trend Micro Worry-Free detected and blocked all ten.

Next, we used Metasploit’s Autopwn 2 feature, to launch a browser-based attack against the system using a known vulnerable version of Chrome with the Java 1.7 runtime installed. The tool launched several attacks designed to gain a remote shell, but none succeeded.

Following this, we launched a version of Windows Calculator with a standard Metasploit binary attached to the end of it. Worry-Free stopped it immediately upon launch and also removed it from the desktop. We also tested a set of Veil 3.0 encoded Meterpreter executables that included PowerShell, Auto-IT, Python, and Ruby. Worry-Free shut them all down, which prevented any further access tests.

Lastly, we disabled the network connection, extracted a set of known malware executables called TheZoo, and attempted to run them. Worry-Free quarantined each of them before it could run, confirming that its signature-based detection worked well. One concern, though, was that Worry-Free was a little slower to respond to inactive threats than some other products. As part of this test, we isolated the machine and ran several versions of the CryptoLocker ransomware to verify that the system could protect against ransomware, and the tool blocked all of the variants on or before execution.

Third-party testing echoes these good results. AV-Test awarded Apex One, which shares the same scanning engine as Trend Micro Worry-Free, a 6 in its August 2021 tests, ranking it as Outstanding. Apex One blocked 100% of 0-day malware attacks in real-world testing using 303 samples, and it blocked 100% of widespread malware discovered in the 4 weeks prior to testing. That test used 18,402 samples.

Improved But Still Expensive

Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services has evolved enough to reach the same level as Kaspersky and Avast, although for the money it's still a little lacking when it comes to advanced features. It just doesn't perform on the same level as products like Bitdefender and F-Secure. Another disappointment was the lack of patch management. All-in-all, while it's not our top choice, the latest version of Worry-Free is very much a stronger competitor than it was in years past.