I remember using malwarbytes as the tool of choice for finding and removing malware.
I downloaded the 'free' version and tried to run it. My experience was that it would only run if I agreed to a 'free' trial of their premium product. Those turn me off. I don't want an experience where I'm tied up for months trying to cancel.
Is my hesitation justified?
Is there a new best malware scanner, preferably with a real free version?
Hello @baumgrenze
You may likely misunderstand how the 14-day premium free trial period works.
At the end of the self-cancelling 14-day trial, MBAM automatically reverts to the free version if you didn't choose to cancel the trial earlier.
You will have never made any payment of any kind, (no credit card is asked for) and thus no cancellation issue.
Please let us know if you have any further questions.
HTH
This is becoming more and more common with once-free-now-trial software. There is no longer a stand-alone free version, but a full version for a trail period which subsequently reverts to a less functional free version after a period of time.
If you haven't paid anything or given any payment details, then there can be nothing to be worried about. You can't be tied up to anything. If not like, just uninstallIs my hesitation justified?
Those tools are portable, you can easily run and update as needed.
Emsisoft - Emergency Kit: Free Portable Malware Scan and Removal
Free eScan Antivirus Toolkit Download | Online Virus Scan
As the other person mentioned there is no loop hole, they basically give you premium for 14 days for free with no catch it activates when you run the program for the first time and then after that it just downgrades to the free version seamlessly there is no credit card or payment info required.
If it was anything obtrusive then they would want your email or want you to make an account before you even download the program.
Outside of that they are all going to give you the same sort of experience where you may get a free premium for x time or often you don't its just a free on demand scanner with no real time features.
I don't really keep up with what is good because i have a lifetime license for MB. Now days i would say Windows Defender is top tier and everything else after that is the same basically if you go on AV test website you can see most of the popular AV solutions out there all sit around the same sort of baseline.
you only have to look on Microsoft's security center and you can see that they are pretty good. Microsoft used to be sub par years gone by and third party offerings where superior like MB being probably the best for its time.
Security essentials was good enough but it warranted a second offline scanner in conjunction, now days you don't need this and defender is good by itself.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mi...o365-worldwide
I would say Defender is probably the best solution because its made from the inside out can't get much better than that and it has improved to the point that it is no longer just good enough.
there is not much point in paying for one either.
You can try ClamWin which is just an on-demand scanner. But is VERY slow if you use it to scan tons of stuff. Great for no more than 1 GB or whatever though.
What I personally do is scan each and every single download at VirusTotal. The general consensus is four hits and you toss. But it realy depends on what you got there and if you know how to read the provided Relations and Behaviors. Don't factor in any of the community input at VirusTotal. I have found that to be a lot of bunk.
I have contributed to the Wikipedia entry here.
A better way to scan a file at ViriusTotal is just to compute the SHA256 hash for the file using a hash calculator. The popular and (really great I may add) file compression utility 7Z has one built into the context menu once installed. You compute the SHA256 hash by right clicking the file and choosing the right click context menu option and then paste that long number (SHA256) in the search box at VirusTotal.
To be fair these third party scanners have never found any malware on my machine (Windows 10) running Defender. They do find a few false positive detections sometimes.
Anyway just for a scan take a look at:
S.O.S. Security Suite - use portable
S.O.S. Security Suite Help - Threat Scan
Ignore "system immunization" and "execute prevent" system hardening tools as using those will lead to problems if you don't know how to use and configure them.
Just run a threat scan and whitelist any items that you want to keep.
Also one I do trust and use sometimes is:
ZHPCleaner
Apologies for the Softpedia download link as it's hard to find otherwise.
There is some info here:
Warnings thrown up
That is because you probably have good computing practices and also the security tech within the mediums has advanced to the point where everything is wrapped in cotton wool. Rewind like 15 - 20 years ago and it was real easy to get an infected PC without much effort.
The landscape is a reflection of this, this forum would be inundated with Virus threads but its not anyone on a forum 20 years ago will remember how virus threads where a common topic.
I remember Malwarebytes was on the top of the list like the very top if you recall back then and where following the timeline there was no other contenders that were even remotely close to it. MB got popular because they shot everyone else in the water as it was the AV suite at the time that was picking up detections that no other suites could detect.
Like the data was night and day it kept ranking at the top while other popular names at the time kept ranking low.
There was very few that were good i think Hitman pro was good back then they got bought out by Sophos which are a market leader.
Now they are all the same with little variance because everyone else caught up so if you pick a known suite it will be just as good as another one.
further in If you know how to stay safe then you will. But its also pretty hard to do dumb stuff today like actively download a virus. Browsers are the gateway but they are pretty good at stopping stuff and if you have all the right things in place to avoid clicking on something or to contain that threat if the worse case then the threat minimizes.
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