In the past few days, I've been looking for software similar to HIPS that would allow me to completely get rid of antivirus software without being as complicated to set up as a true HIPS. Today, I came across a piece of software called "Trend Micro™ Web Trust Agent" on Trend Micro's website:
"Trend Micro™ Web Trust Agent is a lightweight web threat defense tool, only 8MB in size, which can collaborate with any brand of antivirus product, making up for the shortcomings of existing antivirus solutions by immediately stopping users from accessing potentially harmful sites."
It looked pretty good, so I downloaded and installed it. The first time, it froze while installing the Network Driver Interface Specification driver, causing my internet connection to drop directly. It seems like it works at quite a low level. After restarting, I reinstalled it without any issues. As shown in the figure below:
You can see that it's working well. The Web Trust Agent uses Trend Micro's revolutionary real-time internet service (in-the-cloud) security technology to monitor web requests. This real-time protection actively scans for malicious threats coming from the internet, preventing users from browsing websites that have been compromised, attacked, or infected with malware. Its Internet Bot behavior analysis technology can detect suspicious behaviors such as zombies or puppet programs secretly controlling your computer for cybercrime, avoiding malicious software on certain websites from harming your computer and preventing zombie viruses from secretly controlling your computer for criminal activities.
The "Global Web Threat Statistics Report" in the image above is the real-time effect diagram processed by Trend Micro's 24-hour cloud computing of global malicious web pages: [https://securecloud.com/reputation/report](https://securecloud.com/reputation/report).
The security settings for the Web Trust Agent are shown below. The Bot scan can monitor HTTP, SMTP, IRC, DNS, and other information, so the features are relatively comprehensive.
Why do I say it's relatively comprehensive? Because I'm not entirely satisfied with the functionality of the Web Trust Agent. I feel like there are fewer features. During my usage, it only blocked some addresses from 51.la (which felt like a false positive but didn't affect normal browsing). Perhaps I haven't visited many pages with scripts;
During installation, it automatically installs into the "C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\Web Trust Agent" directory, with no option to choose another location, providing a less-than-ideal user experience;
Also, when blocking scripts, the prompts were too simple and seemed somewhat like advertisements (no screenshot available), leaving me feeling like I don't have enough information about what exactly the Web Trust Agent is doing, making me a bit uneasy.
Overall, the Web Trust Agent is still pretty good. It has great compatibility and won't conflict with other protective software, adding an extra layer of security to your machine.
Download address for the Web Trust Agent: