About a month ago, The PC Security Channel (TPSC) ran a test to check out the detection capabilities of Malwarebytes. They tested Malwarebytes by executing a repository of 2015 “malicious” files to see how many Malwarebytes would detect.

This YouTube video shows how a script executes the files and Malwarebytes blocks and immediately quarantines the majority of them.

Malwarebytes missed 34 out of those 2015 files, giving us a score of 98.31%. Many vendors would have been proud of that, but being who we are, we wanted to do better. So we asked whether we could have a look at the files we missed, and TPSC was kind enough to offer us that chance.

Two of the missed files were identified as PUPs. PUP is short for Potentially Unwanted Programs. The emphasis here is on Potentially because they live in the grey area of what people might consider to be acceptable. Some PUPs simply don’t meet our detection criteria.

Anyway, back to the review of the malicious files we missed. As you can see in the sheet below (click to expand), after a full review we were left with four malicious files that we missed and the two PUP-related files.

After circling back to TPSC, they graciously agreed with our assessment of the non-malicious files. That brings Malwarebytes’ score up to 99.8 % which is a lot more like what we are used to score in such tests. The four malicious files have all been added to our detections.

We don’t just report on threats—we remove them

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