Using MBAM as a primary anti-"virus"

[JohnnySokko]

My question pertains to the Pro version of MBAM — because I realize that the free version is not a resident program and does not monitor the system.

Since traditional viruses are very rare nowadays, why can't MBAM Pro be used as person's primary anti-"virus" program?

Most all infections nowadays are due to various trojans and others forms of malware such as spyware, adware, etc. and not the traditional virus that most true anti-virus programs were originally designed to prevent.

Since MBAM is so effective at dealing with these newer malwares, why can it not be used to replace the traditional anti-virus program?

Thanks.

[exile360]

Greetings

That's a very good question, and one that we get quite often and there are several reasons that we do not recommend it:

• The first is obviously the reason you stated, "traditional viruses", while uncommon, do still exist in the wild and we don't typically deal with removing those
  
• File infectors, again, while not as common, infections like Virut do still exist in the wild and we do not disinfect infected legitimate files (currently our engine only removes items, it does not "clean" them)
  
• We do not focus on threats of any type as a high priority that are already well covered by most antivirus products, which can include a threat of any type, including trojans and other non-viruses, this enables our research team to focus specifically on the threats that AV's aren't doing well against
  
• We do not currently detect or block malicious scripts that might be embedded in emails or web pages, our malicious website blocking mechanism only blocks known malicious sites, not legitimate websites that may have been hacked to contain malicious code
  
• We do not scan email or email attachments while most AV's do
  

I believe the above pretty much covers it. If you don't want to have to pay for an antivirus there are several very good free solutions that we highly recommend such as Microsoft Security Essentials and Avast! Free Antivirus.

I hope that clears things up a bit for you.

[goldhound]

Please ignore, i posted without knowing you were being helped.

[JohnnySokko]

Thank you!

Your answer covered the question perfectly! :-) Thanks for explaining the issue in such a thorough manner. :-)

[exile360]

You're welcome, I'm glad to be of service .