In a comparative test of three Small Medium Business endpoint products commissioned by Trend Micro, its Worry-Free™ Business Security Advanced product received the highest total test rating and highest total feature rating over McAfee and Symantec.

The tests, which were conducted between October 2008 and January 2009 by West Coast Labs, part of the Haymarket Media Group and one of the world’s leading independent test facilities for information security products and services,compared and tested the functionality and performance of the then current versions of Worry-Free Business Security Advanced (WFBS-A), McAfee Total Protection Advanced and Symantec Endpoint Protection against a defined methodology and specific technology feature sets.

“In the technologies where a comparison could be identified and tested, Worry-Free Business Security Advanced, achieved a higher score rating,” said Richard Thomas, senior test engineer, West Coast Labs.

The Trend Micro solution received 39 stars in the total test rating compared to Symantec’s 28 stars and McAfee’s 22 stars. In the total feature ratings, which provided grades on feature sets as observed by West Coast Labs during testing, Trend Micro received 45 out of 50 stars compared to Symantec’s 34 stars and McAfee’s 28 stars.

According to West Coast Labs, Worry-Free Business Security Advanced addresses today’s threats and provides product leadership in numerous categories. Worry-Free Business Security Advanced received the highest combined ratings score compared to Symantec and McAfee in the following categories: web threat protection, file protection, perimeter protection, data protection, outbreak protection, and memory footprint. Worry-Free Business Security Advanced is the only product with a Wi-Fi advisor, QuickBooks protection, Instant Messaging and email content-specific outbound filtering, outbreak defense, built-in vulnerability assessment, and true damage cleanup.

Thomas concluded that, “Worry-Free Business Security Advanced goes far beyond a simple anti-malware, anti-spam, or firewall product… a complete security solution that provides high levels of security combined with maximum efficiency for the small-to-medium size business.”

Malware Multiplies

Malware has become more stealthy and sophisticated, with more frequent and specifically-targeted attacks from locations around the world. AVTest.org estimated that the total number of malware at the end of the first quarter of 2008 was almost 12 million files. This represented an increase of nearly 4 million files from the beginning of that year and it’s likely that this pace of increase will continue for the foreseeable future. This drastic increase in both the volume of malware and the wide variety of different types of malware has had a technical impact on the operating efficiency of security solutions.

“Trend Micro is aggressively addressing the malware issue. Powered by the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network, Worry-Free Business Security Advanced provides one of the highest level of protection, with Web threat blocking occurring before any malicious content can be downloaded onto a user’s machine,” said Dan Woodward, director of product marketing SMB, Trend Micro. “Tests proved that Trend Micro’s anti-malware capabilities through Outbreak Defense and Damage Cleanup protect effectively in a variety of attack vectors – HTTP, FTP, SMTP and IM – against a wide variety of different types of malware.”

Worry-Free Business Security is Trend Micro’s flagship SMB solution designed to be safer, smarter and simpler than competing products and will easily adapt to the changing needs of small businesses the complex threat landscape they face. Stopping threats up-front, rather than having to implement a fix after a security incident has taken place, Worry-Free Business Security uses hosted technologies that do the work and block threats “in the cloud.”

Easy to use and deploy, Worry-Free Business Security can be managed by channel resellers via a single console, Worry-Free™ Remote Manager. This can remove administrative burden for solution partners’ direct customers of Worry-Free Business Security