October 2019 • Macworld 73REVIEWMacRansom sample. Malwarebytes didn’t detect
it while it was downloading, installing, or active.
But as I mentioned earlier, that is by design.
When I asked Malwarebytes about its failure
to detect MacRansom the company said that it
was guarding against MacRansom in 2017, but
a year later it had stopped. “In summer of 2018,
we saw that we had not detected even a single
sample of MacRansom in the wild. Because of
that, we culled those rules from the database,”
said Thomas Reed, Director of Mac & Mobile for
Malwarebytes. “We don’t believe in continuing
to detect extinct malware, because that simply
causes extended scan times without any actual
benefit to the customer.”
As Reed told us, this is not a common
approach in the industry, but Malwarebytes
believes it’s more practical.
Ransomware in 2019 is an odd issue. If a home
user gets infected, it is without a doubt one of the
most damaging pieces of malware to come up
against. It’s designed to encrypt all of your files,
and then demand a ransom (usually in the form of
pseudonymous Bitcoin) to decrypt your files. To
make matters worse, sometimes the bad guys won’t
even decrypt your stuff after you pay. These days
ransomware is a bigger issue for businesses than
people at home, which is in part why Malwarebytes
felt comfortable pruning certain kinds of it from its
active database.
It’s true that Malwarebytes scans more quickly
than other security suites, and that likely meansOctober 2019 • Macworld 73REVIEWMacRansom sample. Malwarebytes didn’t detect
it while it was downloading, installing, or active.
But as I mentioned earlier, that is by design.
When I asked Malwarebytes about its failure
to detect MacRansom the company said that it
was guarding against MacRansom in 2017, but
a year later it had stopped. “In summer of 2018,
we saw that we had not detected even a single
sample of MacRansom in the wild. Because of
that, we culled those rules from the database,”
said Thomas Reed, Director of Mac & Mobile for
Malwarebytes. “We don’t believe in continuing
to detect extinct malware, because that simply
causes extended scan times without any actual
benefit to the customer.”
As Reed told us, this is not a common
approach in the industry, but Malwarebytes
believes it’s more practical.
Ransomware in 2019 is an odd issue. If a home
user gets infected, it is without a doubt one of the
most damaging pieces of malware to come up
against. It’s designed to encrypt all of your files,
and then demand a ransom (usually in the form of
pseudonymous Bitcoin) to decrypt your files. To
make matters worse, sometimes the bad guys won’t
even decrypt your stuff after you pay. These days
ransomware is a bigger issue for businesses than
people at home, which is in part why Malwarebytes
felt comfortable pruning certain kinds of it from its
active database.
It’s true that Malwarebytes scans more quickly
than other security suites, and that likely means