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Can a Threat Scan be restricted to just the system disk?


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Malwarebytes is not designed to function like normal AV scanners and uses a new kind of scan engine that relies mostly on heuristics detection techniques rather than traditional threat signatures.  Malwarebytes is also designed to look in all the locations where malware is known to install itself/hide, so a full or custom scan shouldn't be necessary, especially on any sort of frequent basis (like daily), especially since the default Threat Scan/Quick Scan checks all loading points/startup locations, the registry, all running processes and threads in memory, along with all system folders, program folders and data folders as well as any installed browsers, caches and temp locations.  This also means that if a threat were active from a non-standard location, because Malwarebytes checks all threads and processes in memory, it should still be detected.  The only threat it *might* miss would be a dormant/inactive threat that is not actively running/installed on a secondary drive, however if the threat were executed then Malwarebytes should detect it.  Additionally, whenever a new location is discovered to be used by malware the Malwarebytes Research team adds that location dynamically to the outgoing database updates so the locations that are checked by the default Threat/Quick Scan in Malwarebytes can be changed on the fly by Research without requiring any engine or program version updates/upgrades.

Scanning the other drives is not needed on any regular basis.

In addition,

Malwarebytes does not target script files during a scan.. That means MB will not target; JS, HTML, VBS, .CLASS, SWF, BAT, CMD, PDF, PHP, etc.

It also does not target documents such as; PDF, DOC, DOCx, XLS, XLSx, PPT, PPS, ODF, etc.

It also does not target media files;  MP3, WMV, JPG, GIF, etc.

 

Malwarebytes will block execution of those files when malicious only with the anti-exploit module of the paid program.

Edited by Porthos
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Thanks for that, Porthos. So I can leave it set to a regular scheduled threat scan, and it won't go off into the weeds checking umteen terabytes on other drives, yes?

You have also explained something else that I was going to bring up in another post - on another recent machine I found multiple folders/scripts for coin-miners in fake adobe flash folders, yet there were no complaints from MB. And now I am cleaning/recovering my daughter's computer and found several folders containing multi-plug scripts, and again there was nothing reported by MB.

It's changed my outlook on things...

Regards,

 

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14 hours ago, Porthos said:

I assume you are using the free version on her computer?

No, it was still in the free-trial stage. But maybe I am wrong 🙁. I have just skimmed through all the quarantined entries on her machine (there are more than two hundred, and I think adwcleaner had removed ~80 items before I ran MB), and MB had detected a number of multi-plug items. They are all associated with one particular sub-folder (numeric string for a name) in the Program Data folder. It was much later, when I was manually uninstalling/deleting all the junk on her machine (~200GB) that I noticed three more folders with random-alpha string names in Program Data, each containing  a couple of js/json/html files (also with some random names). If they aren't multi-plug-related, is there any way of finding out what they are? It is probably academic now (I renamed the folders and it has had no noticeable effect on anything), but I would really like to know.

Thanks for your time,

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5 minutes ago, Sailor75 said:

No, it was still in the free-trial stage.

Many folks come here after an issue who did not have the premium version to begin with. All the items found would have not made it on the computer in the first place if premium was installed in the first place.😉

if you want to be certain that the system is clean, We do offer free assistance by trained and vetted malware removal specialists.  If you wish they can analyze your system for you and guide you in removing any threats that might be present as well as help to troubleshoot the issues you're experiencing.  To work with them, simply read and follow the instructions in this topic, skipping any steps you are unable to complete, then creating a new topic in our malware removal area by clicking here and one of our malware removal specialists will assist you as soon as one is available.

Edited by Porthos
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