Adwcleaner 7.2.2 reports problems not identified by Malwarebytes Premium

[MikeBoardman]

Good evening all.

I think the title says it all, really. I have Malwarebytes Premium running permanently, and every Saturday I run Adwcleaner 7.2.2 as a fallback.

Today, the latter reported a large number of errors (413), for which the log file is attached.

Malwarebytes Premium had not reported any problems since the last scans the previous Saturday, and when I specifically ran it after the Adwcleaner scan today, it still reported no problems.

I am puzzled and concerned by the apparent discrepancy. Can anyone explain and/or reassure me, please?

Many thanks.

Mike Boardman

AdwCleaner[S13].txt

[Malwarebytes]

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[plb4333]

25 minutes ago, MikeBoardman said:

Good evening all.

I think the title says it all, really. I have Malwarebytes Premium running permanently, and every Saturday I run Adwcleaner 7.2.2 as a fallback.

Today, the latter reported a large number of errors (413), for which the log file is attached.

Malwarebytes Premium had not reported any problems since the last scans the previous Saturday, and when I specifically ran it after the Adwcleaner scan today, it still reported no problems.

I am puzzled and concerned by the apparent discrepancy. Can anyone explain and/or reassure me, please?

Many thanks.

Mike Boardman

AdwCleaner[S13].txt

Please don't take offense, in case this was checked beforehand, but you do have PUP detections set to 'Always', right? In MBAM...

[MikeBoardman]

No offence taken - I can be really stupid at times!

In Settings=>Protection, under Potential Threat Protection I have both PUPs and PUMs set to "Always detect ... (recommended)".

Is this what you had in mind?

[exile360]

Greetings,

A couple of things, first, those detections are actually false positives caused most likely by your use of either Spywareblaster or the Immunize function in Spybot Search & Destroy which place sites in your restricted sites lists for Internet Explorer through those registry keys.  There is currently a known issue with the most recent version of ADWCleaner which causes it to detect these when it's actually looking for malicious sites being added to the trusted sites list (a difference between the number contained in the entries; this is explained in greater detail in this thread).

Second, the entire reason Malwarebytes has kept ADWCleaner around as a separate/standalone tool is because it still detects items that Malwarebytes currently does not, and while they do plan to eventually integrate all of ADWCleaner's detections and capabilities into the main Malwarebytes engine, this hasn't happened yet so they maintain ADWCleaner to keep it available as it still remains useful to people (unlike JRT, which has since been discontinued since its detections/databases were integrated into ADWCleaner a while back).

For now, I would recommend excluding those items from detection which is also explained in the thread I linked to above.  Hopefully the Developers will have this issue fixed soon, and I believe that they do intend to have it fixed in the next release of ADWCleaner, however I do not know when that will be.

If there is anything else we might assist you with, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Thanks

[MikeBoardman]

Hah, that might well explain things.

I have recently started to use the Immunize tool in Spybot Search & Destroy, and have also upgraded to Adwcleaner 7.2.2. I am pretty sure the appearance of these "errors" can't be a coincidence.

Getting late here in the UK, so I'll check out the link you posted tomorrow.

Many thanks indeed - I'm sure I wouldn't have resolved this without your advice.

Mike Boardman

[MikeBoardman]

Just to say a big thank you for the help - it seems to have resolved the issue on both my PC and my wife's laptop.

Mike Boardman

[exile360]

Excellent, I'm glad to be of service.  If there's anything else we can help you with please don't hesitate to let us know.

Thanks