- Apr 25, 2013
- 5,355
The latest report from Dennis Technology Labs contained a shocker for antivirus technology watchers. The free and popular Malwarebytes Anti-Malware came in almost dead last. Does this mean Malwarebytes is no good? Well, not necessarily.
Malwarebytes Responds
"Our score in this test is clearly skewed by the fact that Malwarebytes Anti-Malware FREE is the only product being tested without real-time protection," said a company representative. "Malwarebytes Anti-Malware FREE is specifically designed to clean up threats, as opposed to prevent them from occurring. With proactive protection contributing to a significant portion of the score, it is evident we would never feature highly. This is something the authors of the report have acknowledged. We are also very happy the free product outperformed the rest of the competition when it came to remediation."
It's absolutely true that Malwarebytes is the only tested product with no real-time prevention of malware attack, and real-time prevention is required to get the top score. That means a perfect performance by Malwarebytes, removing all significant traces of every malware sample, could only score 200 of a possible 300 points. That would have earned it certification at the B level, or better. On the other hand, even when I recalculated the score treating each successful cleanup as full prevention, the many samples it completely missed kept the overall score below zero.
Why Test Free?
Given that the non-free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Premium does include real-time protection, I wondered why they selected the free edition for testing. "According to some editors their readers wanted to know how MBAM stacks up against the mainstream products," said Simon Edwards, Technical Director of Dennis Technology Labs. "That's the main reason we included it, to help people understand what it does."
He went on to say, "Malwarebytes also makes some quite serious claims about this product and so it's fair to compare them on marketing claims, even if they don't work in the same way as the other products." Edwards pointed out that the company's home page displays this message: "The New Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Protects you from new online threats that antivirus can't detect. Free version download." He felt that many people, seeing that, would figure the free product gives them full protection.
Exploit Protection
Most of the fresh-daily malware samples used in the months-long test involved exploiting one vulnerability or another. I would have been very interested to see how well Malwarebytes did if the test had included both the standalone free cleanup tool and Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit, also free. That pairing should, in theory, do quite well. Perhaps another time?
I'm not going to demote Malwarebytes from its Editors' Choice status based on this one test. I need more data. I'm especially looking forward to seeing how Malwarebytes fares in AV-Test Institute's malware remediation test. This report comes out once a year, and the new release is just about due.
Malwarebytes Responds
"Our score in this test is clearly skewed by the fact that Malwarebytes Anti-Malware FREE is the only product being tested without real-time protection," said a company representative. "Malwarebytes Anti-Malware FREE is specifically designed to clean up threats, as opposed to prevent them from occurring. With proactive protection contributing to a significant portion of the score, it is evident we would never feature highly. This is something the authors of the report have acknowledged. We are also very happy the free product outperformed the rest of the competition when it came to remediation."
It's absolutely true that Malwarebytes is the only tested product with no real-time prevention of malware attack, and real-time prevention is required to get the top score. That means a perfect performance by Malwarebytes, removing all significant traces of every malware sample, could only score 200 of a possible 300 points. That would have earned it certification at the B level, or better. On the other hand, even when I recalculated the score treating each successful cleanup as full prevention, the many samples it completely missed kept the overall score below zero.
Why Test Free?
Given that the non-free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Premium does include real-time protection, I wondered why they selected the free edition for testing. "According to some editors their readers wanted to know how MBAM stacks up against the mainstream products," said Simon Edwards, Technical Director of Dennis Technology Labs. "That's the main reason we included it, to help people understand what it does."
He went on to say, "Malwarebytes also makes some quite serious claims about this product and so it's fair to compare them on marketing claims, even if they don't work in the same way as the other products." Edwards pointed out that the company's home page displays this message: "The New Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Protects you from new online threats that antivirus can't detect. Free version download." He felt that many people, seeing that, would figure the free product gives them full protection.
Exploit Protection
Most of the fresh-daily malware samples used in the months-long test involved exploiting one vulnerability or another. I would have been very interested to see how well Malwarebytes did if the test had included both the standalone free cleanup tool and Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit, also free. That pairing should, in theory, do quite well. Perhaps another time?
I'm not going to demote Malwarebytes from its Editors' Choice status based on this one test. I need more data. I'm especially looking forward to seeing how Malwarebytes fares in AV-Test Institute's malware remediation test. This report comes out once a year, and the new release is just about due.
