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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Links to fraudulent or malicious websites are a big component of phishing scams. Trend Micro Security taps into its huge Smart Protection Network™ database of risky websites that have a history of transmitting malicious software or supporting online fraud—and blocks you from going to them. In this part of the series, we’ll set up Trend Micro Security to increase your protection against web threats.
1. To get started, double-click the Trend Micro Security icon on your desktop or in your system tray to load the Trend Micro Security Console, then click the Settings The Password screen appears.
2. Enter your Password and click OK. The Protection Settings screen appears, with Scan Preferences selected by default.
3. Select Internet & Email Controls. The Web Threats panel appears by default, with Block potentially dangerous websites pre-checked.
4. In the Web Threats panel, if you want to increase your protection, move the Protection Strength slider to High to block threats in sites that show any signs of fraud or malicious software, then ensure that Display the Trend Micro Toolbar on supported web browsers is checked. With Trend Micro Toolbar, users obtain Page Ratings whenever they search or browse the web, showing safe, potentially unsafe, and dangerous sites using green, yellow, and red icons and shading on search results. You are blocked from clicking links to known dangerous sites.
5. Prevent Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome from running malicious scripts on infected websites should be selected by default. If for any reason it’s not, you should check it.
6. Click Apply to apply your changes.
7. Launch a browser that supports Trend Micro Toolbar, such as Internet Explorer, Firebox, or Chrome. You need to enable the toolbar in your browser. In this example, we use Internet Explorer.
8. At the bottom, a popup appears: The ‘Trend Micro Security Toolbar’ add-on from ‘Trend Micro, Inc.’ is ready for use.
9. Click Enable. The Trend Micro Toolbar appears in the browser menu.
10. Click the Trend Micro Toolbar dropdown menu in your browser. The toolbar options appear.
11. Notice that Rate links on webpages is enabled by default. Select Rate links on mouseover to enable this additional function.
12. Do a search that might include dangerous sites, for example “hackers.com.” In the search results, notice that a red X mark and highlighting has been added to known dangerous websites.
13. Position your mouse over the checkmark in front of a website link to obtain its rating. A popup appears, showing Trend Micro Security’s rating for the website.
14. If you click a dangerous website, you’ll be blocked and shown this screen.
15. Click Close This Window to close the window.
Note that the Trend Micro Toolbar also enables users of Trend Micro Security to obtain page ratings within Social Networking sites such as Facebook, GooglePlus, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and a range of others. Just as in your search results, if you click a dangerous link on the social network’s page, you’ll be blocked.
For more information on Trend Micro Security software, go to the following website: http://www.trendmicro.com/us/home/products/software/index.html#what-it-does
For a video outlining these tutorials, go to the following YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6jjAfOexEE&list=PLZm70v-MT4Jp7ewLG3lo7hxVO_RP8WJuF&index=3
I work for Trend Micro and any opinions expressed here are my own.
Next Week – Part 3: Setting up Antispam in Client Email
