Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is one of the most popular PC security tools, helping you keep your computer safe from malicious software.

The free edition offers an on-demand scanner that detects a wide range of malicious or potentially unwanted software. Its powerful scanning engine can tell you immediately if your system is infected with malware, adware, spyware, ransomware, rookits or rogue security software. Once a threat is detected, the program will provide you details on what it found, then ask you which action to take. This can be deleting the files posing a threat or placing them in a quarantine to isolate them from the rest of the system. You also have the option to ignore a threat if, for example, a program that you know is safe was detected as being adware.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is very efficient at completely eradicating all of the latest security threats from a Windows PC. This includes malware that rival programs may have trouble with, such as rootkits hiding deep in the system or malware that obfuscates its code to evade detection.

There are two main scan modes. The "Hyper Scan" performs a rapid check of programs in your startup objects and those currently in your memory. The more thorough "Threat Scan" goes through your computer's filesystem, the Windows registry, startup objects and memory to detect malware. This lets the scanner find and eliminate malware that may be on your system, but isn't actively running at the time.

As new types of malicious software appears on a regular basis, any security tool needs to be frequently updated to stay on top of the latest threats. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware automatically connects to a secure server so it can download updates for its scanning engine whenever they're available. This happens in the background with no action needed on your part most of the time. On a few rare occasions the program will ask you to restart your system to finish installing a major update, which you can either do right away or postpone.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware's free version comes with a 14-day trial of the more advanced protection features found in its paid counterpart. The premium version offers automatic real-time protection, which detects threats without having to start a scan manually. You also get an anti-exploit shield that protects your browser from security vulnerabilities, more advanced anti-ransomware protection and blocking of known malicious websites.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a popular tool for removing viruses and malware from your PC. There is a freely-available version of the program and a paid version. The freely-available version is highly functional and has access to all the same virus definitions as the paid version. The paid version adds several features, including preventing ransomware from loading, faster hyperscan mode, automatic scheduling of scans, and blocking access to dangerous websites. It is very easy and affordable to purchase a lifetime prescription to the Pro Version of Malwarebytes.

Users of either version will enjoy full antivirus scanning and flexibility in choosing scan types, including custom scans or preconfigured "threat scans" which scan the files and folders most commonly affected by viruses and malware. Hyperscan mode is only available in the paid version of the software.

The paid version also includes heuristic scanning technology which recognizes viruses based on their behavior rather than their digital signature. This technology comes in handy especially for new viruses that haven't had their digital signatures uploaded yet. Many infections that aren't detected by other virus scanners may be detected by heuristic scanning. Furthermore, while digital signatures can often be masked by attackers, heuristic scanners can still detect modified viruses based on their behavior. The disadvantage of this technology is that it is much more likely to return false positives, wrongly identifying harmless files as viruses. Malwarebytes detection history allows for recovery of any wrongly deleted files, however.

Within a few clicks, users can launch the program, select scan type, and run. The actual virus scan runs at a decent pace (faster in hyperscan mode) and presents a full list of detected threats. Users can then select what to omit and what to move to quarantine. The whole process is very straightforward and makes Malwarebytes an invaluable addition to the IT or personal user's toolkit. Since Malwarebytes does not support real-time scanning, it is recommended that it be used alongside a secondary antivirus solution; the freely-available Windows Defender program should be sufficient.

The most recent update of the program presents the user with a new interface showing the step-by-step progress of the scan process. This is an advantage over some virus scanners which fail to show verbose progress updates and cause anxiety for users who may cancel the scans early and restart them unnecessarily.