Trend Micro: out! Back to roots…

I was indeed wrong. Mea culpa about that. Trend Micro Internet Security 2009 is not much smarter than Norton Internet Security 2009. It’s still a stupid, cupid piece of bloatware…

First things first, under certain conditions it can crash like shit while scanning on-demand:

Officially, there is a hotfix to address that, however “this hot fix has received limited testing and has not been certified as an official product update”, so it’s not automatically pulled by the application. But guess what’s the reason of the crash?

While scanning files, the progress bar might make a calculation that divides by zero, causing the software to crash.

Yep. Division by zero. Go figure, they don’t make the patch an official one! (Stupid asses, this is what they are.)

After such a crash, a Windows service is terminated, and restarting it doesn’t help. One has to reboot Windows to benefit again from the Trend Micro protection!

How inconvenient.

Even if we ignore this, we can still find idiocies in the product:

Why, PhotoFiltre is a perfectly clean product, I’m using it for years! What exactly was it trying to do? It was trying to call SetWindowsHookEx to accomplish what exactly?! Trend Shit Micro doesn’t tell this to the user!

Notice the bad GUI programming: the Details area is fixed-size (it can’t even accommodate the file name!) and there is no real information on what hook was the infringing program trying to set!

This is absolutely non-informative and pure shit! How can I distinguish between a legitimate need of a clean application and a rogue attempt of a contaminated version of the same application? And they expect me to pay for this useless software?

I therefore removed it completely. I can’t stand anymore such bloated crap.

For still having a protection other than the common-sense and the caution, I finally reached the starting point:

• Avira AntiVir Personal (Free) — because I don’t need the Web scanning (which is buggy and it could trouble Opera, and it can also screw JavaScript on occasions), I don’t need to be told what sites to visit and what to avoid, I don’t need e-mail scanning (an attachment still has to be executed to infect a system, and the on-access scanning would catch it), and to make sure I installed AntiVir with Win32 heuristic disabled (this should make it stop complaining about the packed and/or encrypted binaries), and with scanning into the archives disabled too (once a binary is not executed, I don’t care about it, as there is no danger).
• ThreatFire (Free) — for a behavioral analysis, something a signature-based antivirus can’t do. It can be stupid at times, but it can also be useful.

This duo doesn’t seem to slow down the system as much as a fully-bloated “security suite” (and I can disable Avira’s resident guard very easy). I still have to decide about an optional outbound firewall (there are many choices, and Ashampoo’s Free Firewall could be as good as anything else), but normally I would need it only to prevent some applications from updating automatically.

I have the proof that ThreatFire is active and watching the system’s activities:

…and I could already enjoy the localized post-update nag screen of the free version of Avira!

For an extended behavioral protection I’ve installed StartupMonitor (and Startup Control Panel).

Case closed. For good!

This entry was posted on February 27th, 2009 and is filed under Software. Tags: Bugs, Merde, Security, Windows.
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