Malwarebytes is our program of choice for scanning customers' systems. It works very well for the most part, but there is one issue with it. When scanning infected system, it does an amazing job of finding and cleaning most, if not all, of the junk (Spybot S&D cleans up the remaining adware and spyware, and Combofix removes any stubborn infections that remain after. This is rare).
However, when scanning infected drives externally from our work stations (for example, if the PC in question is so badly infected and/or slow as to make it impossible to run an online scan), then Malwarebytes may only pick up a couple of items here and there, and very often picks up absolutely nothing at all! This is extremely frustrating! Of course, upon putting the drive back into the original machine, and running Malwarebytes "online", it starts picking up infections out the wazoo.
Shouldn't the same definitions pick up the same files on any environment? What is going on here?
Extra information:
Our customers' OSs vary, but they are mostly XP, Vista, and some 7 machines. We occasionally get 2000 (Also Macs, but obviously that is irrelevant to this issue). ALL our workstations run Windows XP Pro, except for one which runs XP Home. All our definitions are always updated before scanning (both for Malwarebytes, as well as Symantec Endpoint, which is our resident anti-virus). I attach the drives to our workstations with basic SATA/IDE -> USB adapters, nothing fancy.
If we forgot to leave any important information, feel free to ask, and thanks from the Computer Professor team!
Question
Computer Professor
Malwarebytes is our program of choice for scanning customers' systems. It works very well for the most part, but there is one issue with it. When scanning infected system, it does an amazing job of finding and cleaning most, if not all, of the junk (Spybot S&D cleans up the remaining adware and spyware, and Combofix removes any stubborn infections that remain after. This is rare).
However, when scanning infected drives externally from our work stations (for example, if the PC in question is so badly infected and/or slow as to make it impossible to run an online scan), then Malwarebytes may only pick up a couple of items here and there, and very often picks up absolutely nothing at all! This is extremely frustrating! Of course, upon putting the drive back into the original machine, and running Malwarebytes "online", it starts picking up infections out the wazoo.
Shouldn't the same definitions pick up the same files on any environment? What is going on here?
Extra information:
Our customers' OSs vary, but they are mostly XP, Vista, and some 7 machines. We occasionally get 2000 (Also Macs, but obviously that is irrelevant to this issue). ALL our workstations run Windows XP Pro, except for one which runs XP Home. All our definitions are always updated before scanning (both for Malwarebytes, as well as Symantec Endpoint, which is our resident anti-virus). I attach the drives to our workstations with basic SATA/IDE -> USB adapters, nothing fancy.
If we forgot to leave any important information, feel free to ask, and thanks from the Computer Professor team!
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