[Use Case: Scan other drives for Mac]

Hi,

I wanted to describe a use case that explains the need to be able to scan other and external drives with Malwarebytes for Mac. I say other because in this case the drive being scanned is the one internal to the Mac.

The safest way to deep scan for malware is to scan the OS hard drive when the system is not running. This prevents the possibility of the virus scanner getting infected, disabled or run in a VM by hypervisor malware. This is true regardless of what OS you are running. It just removes a whole layer of complexity from the problem.

So, when I scan a Mac with a suspected infection, I boot from a clean MacOS install on an external drive and run my virus scan of the internal (dormant) MacOS drive from there. This is not possible with Malwarebytes.

As much as I love Malwarebytes, it is currently incapable of fulfilling this use case. I argue this is not an edge case but instead a quite common use case for computers with known infections. 

I’m sure I’m not alone in this approach. I know other techs who boot an external linux instance to scan internal drives that are suspected of infection. The thing that is never clear whether the virus scanners only scan for signatures relevant to the active OS or also for the target OS. This is a major oversight in the malware scanning paradigm. But I digress..

Please consider adding external / other internal drive scanning to Malwarebytes for MacOS. It would make sense to do the same in the versions for your other OSes as well.

Thanks,

Pi