40 MACWORLD OCTOBER 2019
MACUSER REVIEW: MALWAREBYTES PREMIUMsaid in a blog post (go.
macworld.com/mlb3).
Malwarebytes
comes in two flavors.
The first is the free
version that is only
capable of removing
malware infections
during a scan.
Upgrade to
Malwarebytes
Premium at an annual
cost of $40 for a single
device or $60 for 10 devices, and it adds
real-time protection, adware and
unwanted program blocking, automatic
updates, and scan scheduling.
Malwarebytes isn’t like your usual
security suite. The company’s been a
trusted name in malware removal for
years, but it didn’t perform as well as other
antivirus suites when we put it up against
samples in the ObjectiveSee malware
library. That is by design, according to the
company, but it leaves us in a difficult spot
to make a judgment.
THE SPOT CHECKS
Malwarebytes did fine with a number of
well-known bits of malware. It had no
trouble detecting Calisto malware, for
example. When it came to Ocean Lotus it
was hit or miss. Apple’s own security
detected a few variants, while others were
not detected at all by macOS or
Malwarebytes. On the plus side,
Malwarebytes did find Ocean Lotus during
a scan after infection, which has always
been the strength of the product.
Finally, I decided to see how it would
stand up against a piece of ransomware
and chose the MacRansom 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 forThe Malwarebytes dashboard for Mac.