TrendProtect Warns Internet Explorers About Dangerous Websites

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 14, 2009
Updated • Dec 9, 2012
Internet Explorer
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TrendProtect is a Web of Trust like web browser plugin for Microsoft Internet Explorer (and soon Firefox) from security developers Trend Micro. The plugin for Internet Explorer will scan and rate the active website and websites listed in search results of the major search engines Google Search, Yahoo Search and MSN (surprisingly not Bing Search). Up to two different indicators are shown on websites. Always visible is the TrendProtect toolbar item that changes its color depending on the rating of the active website.

Seven different color coded ratings are used in the browser plugin. Most important ratings are green for a safe website, red for a dangerous website and yellow which indicates undesirable and suspicious contents.

The second indicator becomes only visible on the supported search engine results pages. Every url on these pages, even the advertisements, will be rated by TrendProtect to give the user an indication of the possible dangers on these websites.

trendmicro trendprotect

The ratings of the service are calculated by taking page and site reputation, phishing scam detection and content categories into account. It is possible to influence some values in the options of the plugin. This includes selecting categories like gambling or adult as undesirable. Another option is the addition of websites to a list of trusted websites.

TrendProtect is available for Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 (although it is not mentioned on the page) only at this moment. TrendMicro has plans to port the plugin to the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Update: TrendProtect has not been updated for a while. The home page lists Vista as the last compatible operating system. I suggest you check out the Web of Trust program for Internet Explorer and other web browsers instead which provides you with a similar service, only one that works in all recent versions of Internet Explorer.

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Comments

  1. junkman said on October 14, 2009 at 7:42 pm
    Reply

    I think all of these add-ons are useless for the most part, unless one really wants to make inquiries about some sites. Otherwise an good antivirus ( Avira Pro in my case) will always inform if one is ready to enter really dangerous website, without any false signals.

    P.S. I say that just because I had bad experiences with both WOT add-on ( it often froze my IE browser) and McAfee SiteAdvisor ( it never let me post my remarks concerning some sites, there are still some bugs), but probably some folks will find these services of great help. ;)

    1. Martin said on October 14, 2009 at 8:55 pm
      Reply

      Phishing sites are usually not detected by antivirus software programs unless you use one of those “Internet security” suites that come with dozens of different modules. I personally do not use these kind of add-ons as well but there are certainly some users who use them and think they are useful.

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