Darkdirk

^^^^THIS IS AN EXCELLENT POINT^^^^ I shudder to think how many hundreds of thousands of hours have been wasted by individual users such as ourselves chasing our tails and needlessly replacing hardware / reinstalling entire systems from scratch, and how many others STILL DON’T KNOW why their systems are freezing. And how much of everyone’s TIME AND MONEY could have been so easily saved by a simple email to so-called “premium” customers (something that they already do every few weeks anyway). You guys can keep claiming that it only affects a “very small percentage of users”, but I’m not buying it anymore. Of the fifteen MBAM Premium / Win7 users that I personally know of (because I recommended it to each of them), only one has remained unaffected by this. ONE. 14/15 is not a small percentage. My guess is that Malwarebytes is justifying calling it a “small percentage” based on total installations (not just Premium) and only counting those who have reported problems. My bet is they’re not sending out an email warning because it would probably verify what they should already suspect at this point, which is that this affects most, if not all, MBAM Premium/Win7 installations. You know how food companies sometimes do massive recalls of millions of pounds of tainted products, even though just a few people actually got sick? Imagine if an expensive food recall could be replaced by a simple email. I guess what I’m saying is, I hope Malwarebytes never gets into the food packing business.

Yessssss Dave!!!!!! This one thousand percent!!! But also... HOW ON EARTH IS THIS STILL GOING ON??? Seriously Malwarebytes, my trust in you guys is plummeting. Fast. I understand that sometimes these things happen with software. Somehow it slipped through beta testing, OK it happens. And then it gets reported to you and you can’t replicate the problem. A little harder to believe, but fine, I guess it’s possible. But here we are OVER FIVE WEEKS LATER and not only have you not fixed it, but you still barely acknowledge the existence of this bug, and your best fix for it is to have people manually uninstall and install an older version, via a link to BOX DOT COM??? Seriously, you can’t even host the file at Malwarebytes??? And mind you, the only people even privy to this rinky-dink workaround are the ones that were able to seek out this information themselves. UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!

I think disabling both will fix it. I haven’t had a single freeze up on any PC since doing that.

Ok, thanks everyone for all the input about potential hardware similarities. I guess there are none. Still though, there has to be SOME reason that this doesn’t happen on all PCs. And I t’s slowly driving me mad. At this point I have two PCs out of about a dozen that have so far been unaffected, and for the life of me I have no idea why.

Out of curiosity, is anyone having this problem on a non-Dell PC? All of the ones I’ve personally encountered so far have been Dells (around 8 or 9 machines, various models). Although not all Dells are doing it either. Based on reading everyone’s experiences, combined with my own, the common thread I am seeing across the board is: Dell PC, Windows7, Samsung SSD, Firefox, and some version of Office Does anyone have a machine experiencing freezes without one of those things? Please let me know.

Well I for one am glad to hear that you’re one Windows 7 client is issue-free and that your holiday has not been bulldozed by this frustrating 1990s-type problem (I mean seriously, when was the last time PCs just “freezing up” was an issue?) But on behalf of those of us who have been seeing this on roughly half of Win7 clients, and patiently dealing with this crap for weeks with no apparent end in sight, I would like to respectfully say that yes, this is as widespread as people think.

Out of curiosity Porthos, are your “100’s of clients” using Win7 and MBAM Premium? And have you been specifically reaching out to each of them to ask if they’ve had any random freezes in the past month?

I can shed some additional light on the MBAM Premium / system freeze issue, as I too have been grappling with this problem since Dec 7th. Most important to note, this was BEFORE the December patch Tuesday, so Microsoft is off the hook here. I have also had it happen on both Win7 64-bit and Win 7 32-bit PCs. Disabling Ransomware Protection alone didn’t fix it, but so far no freezes with both Web and Ransom Protection disabled together. Also, the freezes happen regardless of whether the PC is being actively used. I’ve had it happen overnight, and I’ve had it happen right in the middle of working. This is extremely frustrating and I am shocked that Malwarebytes hasn’t fixed it yet.

This has now happened two days in a row at the exact same time of day. Could someone at Malwarebytes PLEASE shed some light on this? At the very least verify that this is a legitimate IP.

Ok, so just to give you an update, right at the exact same time again today (about 30 minutes ago), a big upload went out yet again to 83.56.43.254. So I can confirm that it was not just a one-time thing on the initial install of .100. A very small file named "mbt.log" in /ProgramData/Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit/ was being modified and changing in size while this was happeining. The contents of this log file are not readable.

Yes, I noticed that as well. Very suspicious indeed. Although I will say that I pinged rs1.malwarebytes.com and it does in fact resolve to 83.56.43.254, so I’m still not sure what to make of that. I would really like it if someone from Malwarebytes could officially verify that IP address as legit.

Thanks for that info. I’ve never paid much attention to the mbae network traffic before. That said, the only reason I really paid attention this time was because I noticed that a pretty good-sized chunk of data (~10Mb maybe) being uploaded, which I’d never seen prior to yesterday. I’m used to programs constantly phoning home and sending out small packets of data and then receiving large update files. But I’ve never seen a big automated upload of data like that. Any theories on what that was all about?

I noticed this exact same thing yesterday around 8pm. A big spike of outbound traffic to 83.56.43.254. Considerably more being uploaded than being downloaded. Could someone from Malwarebytes please shed some light on this, as it seemed very unusual to me. Or at the very least can you confirm whether or not this is a legit official Malwarebytes IP address?