With little fanfare and no announcement to the reseller channel, TrendMicro has released SP3 for Worry-Free Business Security (WFBS) just over two weeks ago now. This update includes many bug fixes since SP2 and additional protection from Ransomware such as Cryptolocker.
Key feature improvements are
- Improved support for Windows 10 (specifically with the November 2015 update)
- Improved detection for Ransomware
- Increased Behavior monitoring protection
- SHA-2 Support for the Web Security Console
Note that WFBS does NOT support Exchange 2016 at all and from what I understand there are no plans for such support. If you have an SMB customer running Exchange 2016, you will need to upgrade and use the full ScanMail for Exchange product.
You can download the update from the Service Packs tab here
Once you get the downloader, it will then in turn download the full update which is around 140MB in size. This can be applied over the top of an SP1 installation without too many issues. During the installation you will see the warning below as it stops the WWW publishing service – so if you attempt to do this install via RD Gateway, you will get disconnected for a few minutes.
After the upgrade, you can see right away from the main webpage that the update is now at Service Pack 3 levels.
After you login, the additional features are located down under the Security Settings of the security group. Below you can see the settings available to the Desktop style group – the section in blue is the new SP3 improvements that are designed to block more of the Ransomware before it even recognises via signature or pattern based scanning. Note that these settings are only available on Desktop groups.
The screen below shows you the settings available to Server groups. You will note the differences available for servers vs desktops. If you are running normal servers that do not have users using them then these settings are fine. If however you are running a Remote Desktop Server or Terminal Server, then it means your users do not have a good a protection level as those available to the desktops. This is unfortunately a limitation of TrendMicro’s approach in this area.
That’s it. There’s not a lot more about this Service Pack for WFBS 9 to say – it installs within around 15-20 minutes and appears to work fine. Time will tell if the additional features improve protection against Ransomware or not – I’m hoping they do as we have a lot of WFBS deployments out there.
One thing you do need to note is many of the Ransomware settings are on by default, regardless of how you had them set for SP2.
If you have apps running from appdata make sure to whitelist them.
If you have weird app issues, crashes etc, be sure to whitelist them.
Are you sure WFBS 9.0 Advanced will never support Exchange 2016? We have been holding off a 2013 to 2016 migration until the product is supported. We have approached pre-sales tech support at Trend Micro (based in Ireland) on two occasions and were advised that support would follow though no time-scales could be offered. We were told to make use of the hosted filtering service that comes with the Advanced on-premise version until such time it was available. If the above is true, we are waiting for nothing and may have to look at ending our use of the product before the license runs out. Would be a shame really….
Hi Marty,
I’m only conveying what I was told by the Global Trend Micro Product Manager (Quoc Ta) for WFBS back in April when I questioned them on this front. I’ve seen nothing further from them at all. The Hosted mail scanning product would work, however, if it misses a virus, you have no way to scan your Exchange Mailbox Database to search for and remove it without installing SMEX. I wish Trend could be a little more transparent on this front.
I have also been advised by pre-sales here in Australia that there is no plan for EX 2016 compatability, and the solution for SMB is to use the hosted mail scanning
I asked our Reseller here in the UK to contact Trend following the above comments and this is the reply I got. When I get some clarification on how, I will of course share. Needless to say, the opposite of what you guys have been told.
“I spoke with Trend late yesterday afternoon and they advised me that they plan to have support in place for Exchange 2016, but have no time scales in place at the moment. The likeliness of this being implemented within the next 12 months is highly unlikely, from the uncertainty of Trend when asking a few questions.
Due to Trend not supporting Exchange 2016, they are offering all customers free SMEX licences – http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/network-web-messaging-security/scanmail-microsoft-exchange/
This is basically to compensate not having the support in place. If you would like an overview of the solution I am more than happy to arrange this, otherwise we can always look what other options there are out there with regards to Endpoints and on-premis mail filtering”.