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Malwarebytes FREE and PRO/Premium - Mini-Review.

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IainB:
If you are interested in how hijack trojans and botnets can be built, there's a really interesting blog post at the Malwarebytes blog: Citadel: a cyber-criminal’s ultimate weapon?
It describes how to set up and operate CITADEL - a "crimekit" (a tool to develop and implement a cybercriminal botnet) - to do things such as, for example infect other PCs and gather data or launch hijack trojans.
It then covers how MBAM blocks a lot of these nasties, but makes the point that user caution is still advisable, as the technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Apparently things like Webinject phishing popups cannot always be detected/blocked, though I think your browser might be able to do something to block spurious third party popups.

worstje:
Personally, I'm not a fan of the Pro version. I once troubleshooted a friend who had it, and it ended up that the Protection module did some really derpy stuff, blocking websites it deemed bad loong after I had turned it off. The symptoms were of sites timing out, which usually point towards a network cabling or routing issue, but the problem was obviously more complicated given the specificify of things that were accessible and others that weren't.  (The kicker: I'm talking Google and similarly big sites.)

It took me a long time to figure out MBAM was causing it too, but eventually the troubleshooters super advanced diagnostics log thankfully pointed me towards some MBAM drivers that were running in a net-filtering context. (This after it repeatedly told me nothing was wrong, all seemed fine, etc.) Eventually, the trick that did it was rebooting the enire machine after disabling the protection module. Never ever did the interface ever give me a list of things that it was actively blocking, either.

After you deal with a 'bug' like that once, you simply don't care to get burned again. So I go with the free On-Demand-Scan for all my needs, and that's good enough, both for my PC and for keeping my stress down. xD

IainB:
There has been a significant update to MBAM. Not sure whether this or previous updates will have fixed the sort of problems that @worstje mentioned above.
I have updated the version number in the review (in the opening post).

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.70.0.1100

New Features:
•   New program logo and icons
•   Heuristics for 0-day exploit detection now implemented in protection module for PRO version
•   Threats detected by the protection module are now quarantined automatically by default
•   Malwarebytes Anti-Malware now shows Windows 8 START screen notifications
•   More Tools tab enhanced with tons of new content and more to come in the future
•   Option to allow a threat to run temporarily (Allow Temporarily) added to filesystem protection prompts
•   Option to add a detected item to the Ignore List (Allow Always) added to filesystem protection prompts

Improvements:
•   Heuristics for detecting new and unknown threats improved
•   Scanner efficiency improved
•   Microsoft Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 now identified correctly in scan logs
•   Help file updated to include information on new features
•   Better compatibility with many other security products in realtime

Issues Fixed:
•   Minor issue with password creation from CLI fixed.

IainB:
MBAM is now up to v1.75.0.1300 (I have just updated the opening post about this).


It seems the MBAM developers caused a major problem for some users the other night, and this blog post (below) describes how they responded to the problem they had caused:    :Thmbsup:   :Thmbsup:   :Thmbsup:  
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Yesterday’s Database Update Issue
    By Marcin Kleczynski
    April 16, 2013
    In Company News

It saddens me to report that at around 3 PM PST yesterday, Malwarebytes released a definitions update that disabled thousands of computers worldwide. Within 8 minutes, the update was pulled from our servers. Immediately thereafter, users flocked to our support helpdesk and forums to ask us for a fix.

I want to offer my sincere apology to our millions of customers and free users. I started this company because I thought everyone was entitled to malware-free computing. We acted overzealously in that mission and realize far superior procedures around updating are needed. More was expected of us, and we failed.

So what’s my promise to you? Working day and night, we are commissioning several new resources to stop this from happening again. We are building more redundancy to check our researchers’ work and improving our peer review.

Here’s what we’ve done to address the issue. We immediately wrote a tool to fix the issue and published instructions on our forums. If you are affected by the issue, please visit the page. If you need assistance or are uncomfortable performing the fix manually, please contact our support team. We have our entire support staff answering tickets feverishly. Tickets are being answered within an hour, and we will reach out to you by phone if e-mail support is not enough.

Please, once again, accept an apology on behalf of our entire company. Let’s get you fixed up and back to a malware-free existence!

Marcin

--- End quote ---

IainB:
Update 2013-06-18 re MBAM Chameleon app. (in addendum in the Mini-Review).

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