Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware Beta is out

Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware is a new product by security firm Malwarebytes designed to protect Windows systems against so-called ransomware attacks that has been released as a beta version to the public two days ago.

Malwarebytes continues to expand its portfolio. After releasing Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit some time ago to complement the company's popular Anti-Malware product for Windows, it has now released the first beta version of Anti-Ransomware.

Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware is available as a public download from the official forum of the company.

It needs to be noted that it is available as a beta version which means that it is not suitable for production environments right now.

Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware

The program has a size of more than 50 Megabytes which is quite large especially if you compare it to the company's other products.

The program itself runs in the background for the most part monitoring activity on the system to identify actions typically associated with ransomware.

According to Malwarebytes, it is proactive and not dependent on signatures. It will detect and block many dangerous ransomware variants.

[..] this beta is extremely exciting as it introduces the most innovative approach in the market today for protecting against ransomware; a completely proactive and signature-less technology that is able to detect and block even the most dangerous of ransomware variants like CryptoWall4, CryptoLocker, Tesla, and CTB-Locker.

The software will prevent the encryption of data on the system by ransomware, by quarantining processes or threads that attempt to infect the computer with ransomware.

The company notes that Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware did block every single ransomware variant that it tested against it.

Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware monitors all activity in the computer and identifies actions which are typical of ransomware activity. It keeps track of all activity and, once it has enough evidence to determine a certain process or thread to be ransomware, blocks the infection and quarantines the ransomware before it has a chance to encrypt users' files. During development Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware has blocked every single ransomware variant we have thrown at it.

No information about the tested ransomware strains were provided so that it is unclear how many different types of ransomware Malwarebytes tested its product with.

The software interface is simplistic. It offers an on-off switch, a quarantine tab that you can use to check all detected infection attempts, and a tab for exclusions which can be useful if you want to make sure that certain processes or files are not detected as ransomware by the application.

Beta users are encouraged to check the list of known issues. Probably the most serious of those are that Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware won't be installed when users upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 10, and that some ransomware may still display background information or dropped html/txt files with ransom instructions even if no files were encrypted by the ransomware process.

Closing Words

Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware could become another interesting product by the company. It is likely that Malwarebytes will release a limited free and paid premium version of the program after the beta test but no information have been provided about this yet.