This article describes the behavior of the Web Reputation Services integrated with Trend Micro products, and clarifies reports from website owners seeing IP addresses related to Trend Micro accessing their websites.
For Trend Micro Customers
If you are using a Trend Micro Product with Web Reputation Services enabled and Trend Micro has not assigned a rating to a site you are visiting, then the URL is tagged for scanning and categorization. The content is scanned automatically by our servers for analysis so that the website in question is assigned a rating in the future. Together with a block list of known bad or infected sites, this prevents Trend Micro customers from visiting malicious or harmful sites moving forward.
For Website Owners
Trend Micro Web Reputation Service is a service designed to protect customers by browsing pages visited by Trend Micro customers, in order to analyze your site for possible malicious code and to categorize the content of your websites.
Thus, you may have noticed a few visits from IP addresses that are associated with Trend Micro. Our servers do not perform any action other than scanning the sites for possible malicious code and categorization of the site's content. This behavior only applies to publicly-available content visited by Trend Micro customers who are using a Trend Micro product with enabled Web Reputation Service.
Once we have assigned a rating to a website, we store the rating in our server cache so that Trend Micro customers, who subsequently visit that same website, will receive the relevant assigned rating. Our servers would generally not need to access those same pages for analysis again.
