Option For Automatic Exclusions

[GlennB]

 

Would it be a handy feature if there was an option to automatically add exclusions for selected AV products?
These exclusions could be added/removed by the standard Update feature.

For example AVAST <> MalwareBytes.
Have MalwareBytes detect the presence of AVAST and give the user the option to not scan its exe's/drivers/Programdata.
It would need thought over notifications from AV suppliers and there maybe a day or two delay in getting an updated list out, but, its certainly no worse than the bun fight it is now.

[exile360]

Greetings,

Normally when exclusions are necessary for compatibility on the Malwarebytes side for an AV product to work correctly alongside it they are actually added to the Malwarebytes databases so that the AV is excluded automatically when updated databases are downloaded that include these changes.  Since they are contained within the detection databases, they don't show up in the Exclusions tab in Malwarebytes but they still have the same effect.

Beyond that, the only issue I could see with your proposed approach would be determining where the AV is installed since many programs, including many AVs, allow the user to choose custom installation locations other than the default Program Files location where most AVs and other software install by default.  The Research team is able to get around this by using the heuristics technologies built into the Malwarebytes detection engine to positively identify the AV's files regardless of their location, thus excluding them from detection even if they are not installed in their default locations.

With all of that said, the Malwarebytes Quality Assurance (QA) team is always testing for compatibility with a large variety of AV products from other vendors to ensure compatibility and when an issue is discovered where exclusions are necessary, it is either documented in the Malwarebytes support knowledgebase found here and/or on the forums in the pinned topics found here, however I have not seen an issue with any AV product in a long time where exclusions in Malwarebytes were actually necessary, only cases where they were suggested to attempt to work around other known issues (as was the case with both Avast and AVG where it was discovered that Web Protection in Malwarebytes 3 conflicted with the web protection modules in those products, requiring that one of the web filters in one or the other products be disabled for the other to work).

However, if you are aware of an issue with Malwarebytes and a third party security product where exclusions in Malwarebytes for that product are necessary and/or help with performance please let us know so that the QA team may investigate and if necessary, have the Research team add that AV to the whitelisted applications in the protection database.