Advice Request Malwarebytes premium like primary AV?

Share practical recommendations that address the author's needs.
Hi, I myself test various products, upon a request I can record a video review of any product. I use various sources to obtain malware. On my tests, Malwarebytes has never performed well with real malware. Malwarebytes Browser Guard is so-so, but you can use it as an extension to complement other solutions. Given that protection is a hit and miss, performance impact is not the lowest, features are not too many and the price is same like Kaspersky, Bitdefender and ESET, I highly recommend that you turn to the competition for protection.
 
oldschool said:
I believe @Nightwalker might offer a different, more nuanced view of Malwarebytes primarily because of its web protection but I'll let him speak for himself.
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I can give a nuanced view as well. In the past month or so I have tested Malwarebytes 3 times in total. On the first test it missed all 5 samples and my test system was encrypted. On both other tests (since I was in a better mood and didn't want to be too tough on it) it blocked 7/10. None of them were 0 days. Malwarebytes has implemented a form of machine learning called anomaly detection - this is where the solution gets trained with "clean" files (usually a set is divided 60:20:20 for training, evaluation and testing). It then establishes a baseline or sense of what's good and everything that deviates from it is considered malicious. It gets flagged as MachineLearning.Anomalous.xxx, where xxx is the percentage of deviation. It's all cool, but works only on PE EXE files and nothing else. Malwarebytes doesn't use reputation and their behavioural blocking, signatures and heuristics are not the greatest around. Its exploit and malicious website blocking capabilities are great, but not enough to compensate the lack of everything else and exploit prevention is now built-in to Windows. In the light of all that, I would not even use Malwarebytes free as a second opinion scanner, leave alone paying for it. There are free products, much more effective.
 
Malwarebytes started as a second opinion scanner and it was a very good one so it quickly gained reputation among IT people and computer technicians, then they wanted to expand their business trying to compete with consumer AVs but instead of partnering with more experienced older companies like Avira or Bitdefender to get signatures and share threat intelligence (like all the new kids in the AV industry do) Malwarebytes preferred to write their own in-house RTP modules from scratch.

I think that's why they just can't keep up with new 0days at the same pace other popular AVs do (althrough their web protection is quite decent), so I currently can't recommend anyone to use MBAM Premium as your only line of defense (skipping the fact that it's a heavy product).
 
Malwarebytes is, and hever have been, good enough to be an antivirus, their product only became worse after they tried to become one, I tested it once, it cant even find some new variants of the emotet malware and when I scanning a folder with malware it only found 60%~ of them, it only becomes worse after they misleading customers after calling traditional antivirus "dumb" just because their way of detection is supposedly so unique, when litteraly every single major AV uses some kind of AI/ML, the worst offender is that they say you can click every link with confidence just because you use their browser extension.

And I havent mentioned how large of a performance impact it has and the fact it uses half a gig of ram when idle.
 
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For me personally, it was pointless, I used it for about 2 weeks as Primary.

It blocked 1 site, and that's it. My browsing risk isn't high and I'm not click happy either.

An annoying feature are the scheduled scans. Deleted it twice and it came back.

After 2 weeks it was Uninstalled and the Malwarebytes Account was deleted too with the 2 year Premium license (so don't ask for it).

Returned to Microsoft Defender. Good, trusted and reliable for minimal interference when using the PC.

If you're prone to malware, downloading unknown files etc then use your own preferred Free or Paid AV. YOUR BROWSER CAN BLOCK MALWARE TOO.

All opinions are my own.
 
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Mbam was always a brilliant second opinion scanner which could run in the background, then as I remember some time with version 3 (?) they did announce on their website it could be a main AV program, again as I remember they moved somewhat on this opinion and offer conflicting advice on that now - Me: I used it for many years but now despite having licenses I wont even have the resource hogger on my PC's - I feel you can do better as a second opinion program & certainty not as a main AV.
 

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