If you’ve ever been “phished,” you’ve experienced the dangers of receiving phony emails, downloaded files, instant messages, or links to false websites masquerading as real ones—all designed to steal your data, your identity, or most likely, your money.
You need to be vigilant to not fall for these scams, but vigilance is not enough these days. You need the help of top-notch security software, such as Trend Micro Security. Its sophisticated anti-phishing technologies can help protect you from being scammed.
In this four part “Protect Your Net” series, I’ll teach you how to set up Trend Micro Internet Security, Maximum Security, or Premium Security to optimize your protection against phishing. Specifically, I’ll provide instructions for setting up the following features, with the topic for the week highlighted in bold:
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Part 1: Setting up Data Theft Protection
The first item of business to protect against phishing is to enable and use Trend Micro Security’s Data Theft Prevention feature. By storing just a few digits of your credit card number in Trend Micro Security, you can help stop hackers and spyware from intercepting sensitive information and potentially stealing your identity. Providing a couple of words from your home address or digits from your phone number you can prevent your kids from sharing this personal information through email, via instant messaging, or with untrustworthy websites.
Before you activate Data Theft Prevention, however, you first have to create a password in Trend Micro Security, to protect your custom settings.
1. Open your Trend Micro Security Console by double-clicking its icon on the Desktop or in the Windows System Tray. The console appears.
2. Click the Settings icon, to the right of the big Scan The Protection Settings screen appears, with Security & Tuneup Controls > Scan Preferences selected by default.
3. Click Other Settings, then Password. The Password screen appears.
4. Check Enable password protection to prevent unauthorized changes.
5. Enter a password and then enter it again to confirm it. Trend Micro Security gives you feedback on your password strength.
6. Fill out the Password Hint and Email Address fields in case you forget your password later. Trend Micro Security can email your password to you if that happens.
7. Click Apply to save the password, then OK to close the Protection Setting.
Setting up Data Theft Prevention
1. Back in the main Trend Micro Security Console window, click the Privacy The Privacy screen appears.
2. Click Configure for Data Theft Prevention. The Data Theft Prevention Introduction screen.
3. Read the Introduction to understand how the function can help protect your privacy, then click OK to close it. The Password screen appears.
4. Enter your password and click OK. The Data Theft Prevention settings screen appears.
5. Click the slider to ON to enable Data Theft Prevention. This turns on Data Theft Protection and Trend Micro Security provides you with some suggested categories, such as Phone Number and Credit Card.
6. You can edit a category name by typing over it; then, in the What to Protect column, type the actual data you wish to protect: for example, in the Phone Number field you might type 7074567890, or just the last four digits. Once you save it, Trend Micro Security hides it using asterisks. Simply click in the field to make it visible.
7. Click + New Category to add a new category, or click the trashcan to the right of What to Protect to delete that category.
8. Click OK to save your changes.
For more information on Trend Micro Security software, click here. For a video outlining these tutorials, go to the following YouTube link.
Next Week – Part 2: Protecting against Web Threats
I work for Trend Micro and any opinions expressed here are my own.
