VirusTotal-only detections, not detected in Desktop product

[pbust]

The scanner that we have in VirusTotal is a command-line version of the Malwarebytes engine, which is very different in nature than the Desktop product that all our customers install.

In addition, the command-line scanner in VirusTotal has some aggressive heuristics enabled which are not enabled in the Desktop product. Also, our Desktop product includes some additional whitelisting checks which are not present in the command-line version.

In summary, certain heuristic detections from VirusTotal do not necessarily reflect the detections end-users would see from the Desktop version of Malwarebytes. This is not specific for Malwarebytes, as many other antivirus vendors in VirusTotal have a similar situation, where their VirusTotal cmdline scanner enables aggressive heuristics which are disabled by default in the Desktop product.

These discrepancies typically solve themselves over time, as our files processing and engine training backend picks these files up and marks them as goodware, and VirusTotal clears their cache and re-scans those files.

If you are a software vendor affected by this issue and after a few days it is not solved automatically, please re-submit the file to VirusTotal for re-scanning. If the problem persists after waiting a few days and submitting for re-scan, please post in this forum for a researcher to investigate further.

Edited August 4, 2022 by pbust