Understanding Malwarebytes: Is It Safe to Use?

Malwarebytes Core Features

Malwarebytes is a lightweight solution with features tailored toward scanning, protecting, and removing malware from various devices. Notable features include:

Powerful Virus Scanner

Malwarebytes offers a powerful scanner that can detect and block various prevalent malware. It uses machine learning, heuristics, and database signatures of known malware.

Unlike other antivirus/antimalware solutions, the Malwarebytes virus scanner is fast and uses fewer system resources. Usually, this results in less impact on overall system performance.

The virus scanner offers three types of scans:

• Threat Scan – This scan checks for threats in common areas of your device, such as the memory, startup items, registry objects, and file system.
• Quick Scan – This is a less comprehensive scan that looks for active threats on your device’s memory and startup objects. It is recommended to run a threat scan if Quick Scan detects threats.
• Custom Scan – This scan allows you to configure and pick what you want to scan on your device. Options include memory, registry, startup, rootkits, unwanted programs, archives, and folders.

Real-Time Protection

Malwarebytes offers impeccable real-time protection. According to AV-Test, Malwarebytes scores an industry average of 99.4% for protection and 100% for detection.

Malwarebytes uses a multi-layered approach to real-time protection. The main protection layers include:

• Web Protection: This layer offers online protection against malicious sites containing malware, phishing campaigns, and other online scams.
• Malware & PUP Protection: This layer protects you from malware such as viruses, adware, and other threats, including potentially unwanted programs (PUPs).
• Ransomware Protection: This layer blocks ransomware that might encrypt your files, lock you out of your device, and demand a ransom for access.
• Exploit Protection: This layer blocks malware threats that take advantage of bugs and vulnerabilities in your system to propagate further attacks.

There are also other protection layers in the settings menu, such as:

• Brute force Protection – This layer protects your device against unauthorized access through the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and other remote connections
• Uninstall Protection – This layer blocks malware that tries to disable or remove Malwarebytes from your system.

Malwarebytes Browser Guard

Malwarebytes offers you an option to install the browser guard extension. You can also download it for free. This extension blocks ads, trackers, and malicious websites.

Primarily, browser guard works best against malicious sites than it does with blocking ads.

Additionally, this extension can detect and block tech support scams.

Privacy Virtual Private Network

Malwarebytes offers a premium subscription bundle that provides a privacy-focused VPN. This VPN has 500 servers across 30 plus countries, uses the WireGuard protocol, and doesn’t log or store user data. There is also a kill switch.

Malwarebytes Privacy VPN only offers essential protection and functionality compared to other comprehensive premium VPNs such as ExpressVPN.

You can’t use it to unblock streaming services like Netflix or bypass heavy censorship. Nonetheless, it offers faster speeds and supports P2P traffic.

Play Mode: Suspend Malwarebytes Notifications

This feature allows you to pause Malwarebytes notifications when using various apps. It is useful when you are gaming, streaming, or doing a presentation.

This is a premium feature, and it is not available on the free Malwarebytes product. Thus, free users cannot use it to pause product notices and other annoying Malwarebytes ads.

Nonetheless, there are other workarounds free editions users can use to stop Malwarebytes upgrade notices and ads.

Wrap Up

Malwarebytes is a reliable antivirus/antimalware tool that can be used in conjunction with your existing antivirus/antimalware software to enhance the protection of your devices from malware and various other security threats.

Typically, Malwarebytes is seen as a tool primarily for scanning and removing malware, lacking the security and privacy features that are often included in other antivirus/antimalware packages.