Another DNS issue / Slowness confirmation

[Propheticus]

Hi,

I've been a fan of Malwarebytes since I was a student and helped people fix their slow PCs, often riddled with malware and PUPs/toolbars. 
As an ad-hoc scanner/cleaner there was no better option. So I'd always have a portable version with the latest definitions with me on my (write protected) USB-stick with malware removal tools.

At some point I earned a life-time license and started using MWB as real-time malware/virus protection (together with Windows Defender). I thought it would be only fair to explain why I have now decided to uninstall it. It's also to underwrite the issues several others have recently posted about. These issues might be more widespread than currently visible. They're not easy to diagnose for regular users, because it's often other apps like your browser that display the issue. 

In recent year, every now and then new (major) releases led to issues ranging from annoying to rather serious. From slow browsing to entirely crippling performance and overall system instability. As an IT guy, I'm lucky I can troubleshoot and fix most issues myself. If I would be a regular home user, I think I'd lost my patience a lot earlier. 

The most recent issues I encountered are:

1. Resolving host...   in Chrome took literally ages. Also other DNS operations would time out or take very long. A reboot would temporarily fix it. Seemed to creep in over (up)time, possibly related to the daily quick scan.
2. After a longer uptime not a single application would start anymore or take very very long to do so. (I often use sleep instead of a shutdown, only rebooting to update or fix issues) 
   possibly a memory leak as hard faults / interrupts and mem usage were strangely high.
3. The event viewer would be full of errors about permissions (apps trying to instantiate storage folders; so file system rights & DCOM application specific local activation permissions)
4. Every few boots OneDrive would fail to start and access online files properly. Retrying/starting OneDrive never helped; only a reboot could solve it, but it was a lottery. 
5. Updating MWB indicated to take forever. It kept showing the spinning circle "installing updates". The first time I minimised the the UI to tray to continue browsing while waiting. Opening the UI again was no longer possible. A reboot resolved it and the update appeared to be successful.
   The next time it happened I did not close the UI but lost patience after at least half an hour of spinning wheel action. After the reboot all seemed fine again, logs and file update timestamps showed the update had already finished long before I had rebooted.

I recently performed a clean install using the support tool to fix issues 1 and 2. While it looked like it fixed the DNS issues, I could not test long enough to be sure. The reason was that issue 2 popped up again and I was truly fed up by now. 
This is when I decided to uninstall Malwarebytes and use Defender instead. I've hardened it to be a bit more strict (using MAPS with cloud protection set to high and block at first sight enabled). Recent real-life* tests on eg. AV-comparatives show that even with default settings its defence is rather good nowadays. Even scoring higher than Malwarebytes. 

I'm using Windows 10 Pro N on version 1909 which was cleanly installed in August. All drivers and apps are kept up-to-date. 
I was not on a VPN and not part of a domain group. This is my home PC. The only tweak in MWB I did was turning off the forced registration in security centre (to keep Windows Defender on).
 

In conclusion. Until you resolve the stability/reliability issues and provide a noticeable improvement over what comes for free with Windows 10, I'm not reinstalling Malwarebytes.

 

*: They use real-life attack vectors like network shares/email attachments/website urls hosting the malware instead of a flat test that simply runs malware executables already on the local fs.
I know the default answer about your behaviour detection being bypassed by the way they test. In my opinion it's no longer true they defeat this behaviour based security layer.  They mimic a user visiting websites referring to malware (not the direct download URL) and opening emails. 

Edited May 4, 2020 by Propheticus
typo

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