Quite often I’m being called by friends or relatives to help them with various computer-related problems. Many times these problems are caused by malware such as trojans, spyware, etc., or viruses. Only by checking the running processes and their details is usually enough to let me know if malware is the cause of the problems. Until now, I managed to solve this kind of problems, the ones caused by malware and viruses, only by relying on just a few smart tools: Kaspersky Antivirus, Spybot, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, a-squared Free, a-squared HiJackFree, etc. I never failed on disinfecting a computer and making it run smoothly once again since I’m using these utilities. So I won’t hesitate to recommend them to everybody, as the feeling of satisfaction I may enjoy after I leave a computer clean and a friend happy once again is truly great.

Since a new version of Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (1.24) has just been released on the 30th of July, I’ll talk about this tool this time.

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware is actually an already pretty popular and highly-awarded tool. Many security experts around the world use it and recommend it to other people. That’s understandable - there are a lot of things to really appreciate when it comes to this software.

You should know though that even if this program is mentioned as freeware, its real-time protection module is available only in the Pro version, which may be purchased for $24.95 USD. But the most important feature of this software, that is, the anti-malware scanning and removal feature, may be used for free.

You may download the latest version of Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware here. At the end of the installation process you may choose to immediatly update Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and to launch it right away. Its interface is really simple, making this tool easy to use for anyone. The main features are well organized in the upper side of the main interface.

The first one is the scanning function. You may choose between a quick scan and a deeper full scan. Each time I used this tool, the quick scan prooved to be just enough to find well-known nasties such as Vundo, Virtumonde, Zlob, the AntiVirus 2008 rogues, Smitfraud variants, etc. I’ve also noticed this far that the quick scan is pretty much really quick. On an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4800 + 2.51 GHz with 2 GB of RAM and Windows XP installed the quick scan took about 4 minutes.

If you want to scan deeper or some specific drives, select the full scan option. Of course, it will take a lot longer. It took 30 minutes on the above mentioned system, to scan 35 GB containing 121368 objects.

I haven’t noticed any major differences of the CPU usage values between the quick and the full scan. In both cases, the CPU usage was all the time much lower than 16% from as far as I could see.

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware’s interface lets you also quickly view the items stored in the quarantine after the system has been scanned. These items may be permanently deleted or restored if any false-positive situation occured.

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware also creates and stores log files in .txt format which you may easily view at anytime by choosing the “Logs” tab of the main interface. The items in the “Ignore List” may also be easily viewed and removed.

In the “Settings” tab you may change the program’s language, add Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware’s scan to the right-click context menu or enable/disable the automatical creation and display of log files when the scanning processes are complete. Other available options are: terminating the Internet Explorer during removal, automatically sending anonymous statistics to Malwarebytes’ Threat Center or choosing which type of objects you want to be always scanned (memory, registry, filesystem, extra and heuristics objects).

You may also report bugs or false-positives or use the included “FileASSASSIN” tool that can delete the locked files on your system.

When it comes to the compatibility of this tool with other antivirus and firewall programs, I’ve seen nothing to worry, and I used Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware on many computers, having installed various antiviruses (Kaspersky, BitDefender, NOD32, avast!, etc.)

Good parts: “Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware is an anti-malware application that can thoroughly remove even the most advanced malware.” - that’s the producers’ description, that’s what I’ve seen that Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware truly does. It finds and removes malware with great efficiency. And it’s not only reliable, but also easy to use.

I’ve found on the Internet that there are a few people complaining about a series of not-so-good parts when it comes to Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, such as false positives, but this never happened to me yet, and I’ve used this program quite a lot, on many different computers.

Not-so-good parts: When scanning, it displays only the elapsed time. There is no estimation for the job completion time displayed. I’d also like to be able to send the application to tray instead of taskbar while it’s performing a full scan. Yet this option seems to be unavailable in the free version.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 9:02 am and is filed under Freeware that rocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.