11/18/2020
Trend Micro Becomes First Cybersecurity Company to License NewsGuard Ratings, Protecting Its Customers from Misinformation
Global internet security firm launches Trend Micro Check in the U.S., providing NewsGuard ratings and Nutrition Labels about news and information websites
(November 18, 2020 – New York City) NewsGuard today announced a licensing partnership with Trend Micro, a global leader in cybersecurity, under which NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Label reviews for all the news and information websites accounting for 95% of engagement will be integrated into the new Trend Micro Check chatbot tool launching today in the U.S.
Previously made available in Japan and Taiwan, the Trend Micro Check real-time online tool is now being offered in the U.S. with new features that protect users against misinformation and hoaxes, representing the first integration of NewsGuard data in the cybersecurity sector.
“Our society is facing one of its greatest challenges today in the publication and sharing of misinformation,” said Lynette Owens, founder and global director of Trend Micro’s ISKF program. “We are excited to work with NewsGuard to expand the ways we help protect people online beyond threats such as phishing or scams. Together we are empowering people to be critical consumers of online information and this collaboration is a tool to help them do that.”
Trend Micro Check has four key elements:
- News Reputation Check partners with NewsGuard to provide information about the reputation and reliability of news websites. NewsGuard provides a Nutrition Label and an overall red or green rating indicating the general reliability of thousands of websites, based on nine basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice.
- Fact Check, which leverages Google Fact Check API to surface information from third-party fact-checking sites, helping users to ascertain the trustworthiness of an article, post, picture, audio message or even audio to text.
- Security Check, which uses Trend Micro’s world-leading threat intelligence to check if a website/URL is fraudulent or infected with malware.
- Privacy Check, which taps Trend Micro’s ID Security service to see if users’ email addresses have appeared for sale on the dark web, enabling them to change passwords accordingly.
“Our human intelligence team is pleased to partner with Trend Micro as it takes this important step to root out the online misinformation creating a global “infodemic,” said Steven Brill, NewsGuard co-CEO. “NewsGuard’s Trend Check tool will give people the context they need to decide which news sources to trust and which to take with a grain of salt.”
Trend Micro Check is free and currently available in the U.S. for Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Google Chrome extension users. Users can request more information about a website or a news article simply by copying and pasting a web site URL into the Trend Micro Check message bot, which immediately returns the site’s results. For more details, see check.trendmicro.com.
About NewsGuard
Launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides credibility ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information websites. NewsGuard rates all the news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement across the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and Italy. NewsGuard products include NewsGuard, HealthGuard, and BrandGuard, which helps marketers concerned about their brand safety, and the Misinformation Fingerprints catalog of top hoaxes.
NewsGuard rates each site based on nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a site repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. It awards weighted points for each criterion and sums them up; a score of less than 60 earns a “Red” rating, while 60 and above earns a “Green” rating, which indicates it is generally reliable.
NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels can be licensed by internet service providers, browsers, news aggregators, education companies, and social media and search platforms in order to make NewsGuard’s information about news websites available to their users. Consumers can access these ratings by purchasing a subscription to NewsGuard, which costs $2.95/month and includes access to NewsGuard’s browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and its mobile app for iOS and Android. The extension is available for free on Microsoft’s Edge browser through a license agreement with Microsoft, and NewsGuard’s ratings can also be accessed free through the Edge mobile browser. Hundreds of public libraries globally receive free access to use NewsGuard’s browser extension on their public-access computers to give their patrons more context for the news they encounter online. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.
About Trend Micro
Trend Micro, a global leader in cybersecurity, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Leveraging over 30 years of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro enables resilience for businesses, governments, and consumers with connected solutions across cloud workloads, endpoints, email, IIoT, and networks. Our XGen™ security strategy powers our solutions with a cross-generational blend of threat-defense techniques that are optimized for key environments and leverage shared threat intelligence for better, faster protection. With over 6,700 employees in 65 countries, and the world’s most advanced global threat research and intelligence, Trend Micro enables organizations to secure their connected world. www.trendmicro.com
NewsGuard Contacts
- Steven Brill, Co-CEO, steven.brill@newsguardtech.com, +1 212-332-6301
- Gordon Crovitz, Co-CEO, gordon.crovitz@newsguardtech.com, +1 212-332-6407