Getting rid of Malware Bytes

  • 28 March 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 37 views

Userlevel 1
Good idea since I now have Webroot? Or keep i? Still running XP on an old tower. Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
 
John

2 replies

Userlevel 7
Hi johnhd
 
Welcome to the Community Forums.
 
To be honest there are differing opinions on this question.
 
From my experience WSA & MBAM should play nicely together as WSA has been designed from the ground up to work with other security apps. Having said that there have been some reports of issues (if you do a search of this site at the Community level with the search criteria "MBAM" you should find some relevant threads) but these are few and far between.
 
However, there is one thread (HERE) in particular that I would draw you attention to as it refers specifically to Win XP. Have a good read through for more explanation.
 
I have run both together under Win 7 & Win 10 and have not yet encountered any issues.
 
Hope that helps?
 
Regards, Baldrick
Here's my two cents worth.
 
I've been using Webroot SecureAnywhere and its predecessor Prevx for over 10 years. For many years, I used it alongside another AV but slowly came to the view that this was unnecessary and therefore for the last few years have used just Webroot without any issues.
 
I have never been infected since changing to this solution. Which is very different from my previous experience with other AVs that were household names and that (based on my experience) claimed rather more than they actually delivered.
 
However, I should add one proviso to the above statement.
 
Webroot has imo one weakness in its protection and that is with regards to PUPs (potentially unwanted programmes). Its protection is unfortunately not as strong as it might be in this area. And that was demonstrated to me just a few days ago. From about a week ago (and for the first time since using Prevx/Webroot) I found an unwanted PUP on my Windows 7 device for no explicable reason (I am not aware of having permitted my computer to install this application). What was happening was that I found  a www.pokerstars.be welcome window regularly popping up on my screen. It eluded the normal recommended method for removal: https://community.webroot.com/t5/Techie-KB/How-to-Remove-Potentially-Unwanted-Applications/ta-p/40744 as the PUP was not visible on my browser add-ons page or on the Windows programmes and apps list.
 
I managed to track down the issue to an annoying little programme called bus.clevernt.com .I found that a download of Malwarebytes free AV version and a manual scan successfully detected and removed this nasty little PUP. Malwarebytes is, I believe, known to be particularly ruthless against PUPs.
 
Moral of this tale (for me): so far I have found Webroot to be entirely sufficient, indeed more than sufficient, for protection against real malware, but I have found that in the grey area of PUP's (malware? not malware?  Here indeed is a grey area. Bus.clevrnt.com was behaving on my computer in ways that were, for me, almost malware-like) Webroot unfortunately did not provide the protection I would ideally like to have seen. So I have decided to keep a copy of Malwarebytes AV on my computer to manually load and perform a manual scan in the event of a future PUP infection.
 
In summary:
My experience of Webroot compared with several other reputable AV products I previously used with regard to malware protection:
Webroot:                                      20
Other products I have used:       0
My experience of Webroot compared to Malwarebytes for PUP protection (based on one infection in the last 10 years):
Webroot:                                         0
Malwarebytes:                              20

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