Review of: MalwareFox Antimalware
Use: Malware Detection & Removal
Effectiveness
Price
Ease of Use
Support
We Like
- Lightweight
- Aggressive Detection
- Superb Real-time Protection
- Pro-Active Ransomware Protection
We didn't Like
- Doesn't inspect Websites
- Some False Positive Detection
Summary: MalwareFox is an upcoming decent anti-malware tool which can compete with the best programs out there and can even surpass them in some aspects. We liked it because of it's agressive detection capabilities and light resource usage.
How many times your browser was injected with pop-up ads even though Antivirus was installed?
How many times your Antivirus program was unable to disinfect PC?
Considering the advent newer form of cyber crimes, Anti-Malware software have become necessity these days. This is because traditional Antivirus programs are incapable of catching every threat.
Today, we are reviewing one such Anti-Malware solution called MalwareFox which claims to hunt down what your Antivirus cannot.
Features and protection
Before we dig in to the actual experience that I had with MalwareFox and my thoughts about it, let’s see what MalwareFox promises to offer before we can even install it and if it keeps these promises.
MalwareFox has both a paid and a free version. If you choose the free version you will have everything that the premium has to offer for 14 days, after that you can either choose to keep the free version and lose the advantages of premium, or you can upgrade to premium. Let’s take a look at the features that each version promises to offer.
MalwareFox offers protection in real time and protection from zero day exploits, which means that it will prevent any malware from infecting you before it can even get inside your PC.
Moreover, there is Ransomware protection. Ransomware is a kind of malware that encrypts all of your files and asks for a ransom in order to give you your files back.
It can also carry out browser cleanup where it removes any kind of malicious adware causing annoying popups and abnormal browser behavior.
MalwareFox promises to be really lightweight and fast which is something really good for those with slow computers or those that are using a Laptop as that will possibly give them more battery life.
The only difference between the free and the premium version is that the free version will only scan and remove malware that is already on your PC, while the premium version will prevent malware from ever infecting you at all. This means that the free version will have.
- No real-time protection
- No Ransomware protection (If you get infected by one then you earn nothing by removing it, your files are already gone except when decryptor is available)
- And no protection from zero-day exploits
All in all, if you have important files on your PC that you don’t want to ever risk losing, then getting the premium version is a must for you.
If on the other hand you don’t really care for something like that or if you are some kind of PC expert and you’re sure that no virus can touch you (which isn’t possible, your chances of getting infected are smaller but that’s all) then you might be able to stick with the free version and stay safe.
Installation
Honestly now, I’ve been using computers for years and I never saw a security application that was so fast to set up. It took me about two minutes to go to the website, download the application, install it, and to update it to the latest version. Two minutes with a desktop that has been hanging around for a decade and an internet connection of 300 kb/s.
The size of the application was 5 megabytes to download and 15 MB to install.
All in all, it was really fast and easy to download it and to set it up with pretty straight forward instructions and of course with no adware or anything like that. So I was really satisfied with the installation and the setup process.
User Interface and First Impression
Opening up the application, you’ll have the option to turn real-time security on or off, scan for malware, access the settings, the applications that you have put on quarantine, your product key, and your reports. It is plain, simple, and pleasing to the eye, that’s just my opinion though.
I performed the first scan on my internal Hard Drive of 40 gigs and it took about 8 minutes to finish.
I know that at first glance that might not seem too fast, but keep in mind that this scan was performed on a PC that has less than 2 gigs of ram and an Intel Pentium 4 processor. Nowadays even the cheapest notebook that you can find can outperform this and I think that it’s amazing how lightweight this Anti-Malware program is.
When scanning for Malware the CPU usage was between 20-30% and the RAM occupation at about a 100 megabytes. When not scanning, with real-time protection on, the CPU usage was always at 0% and the RAM at about 50 megabytes.
I didn’t try turning the real-time protection feature off because as I said, even with real-time protection on there was no noticeable impact on the performance of my PC whatsoever.
If you have a more mid-range PC then I suppose that you will not notice any drops in your performance even when Malwarefox is scanning for Malware at full throttle. I’ve tried a lot of Anti-Malware applications and I removed them all solely because they were slowing down my already slow and weak PC, so it seems like MalwareFox will be the one to stay on my PC for a while.
Turns red when malware is detected.
One more thing that I liked with MalwareFox, is that it gives you the option to ask individual drives, folders, or files. As far as I noticed the default scan only looks on your internal drive and that’s what I like. That is because my external drives contain mostly my games and my backup files, if a virus was going to be somewhere that would be my internal drive because everything that I download and install apart from games goes there.
Still, I performed a scan on my external Hard Drive which has 80 gigs of memory just to be safe, it took almost 14 minutes to finish and as I expected no threats were found. Which is also a good thing because a lot of security programs were reporting a whole lot of applications as possible threats, which quite simply was not the case and I was wasting my time having to check all of them just to be safe.
Everyday Usage
Once you install MalwareFox you will forget that it exists on your PC. Just enable the scanning schedule that best fits you and let it do its thing, I’ve set it so that it will perform a scan every day at morning hours where my PC will surely be on and I simply forget that it's even there, I never have to bother for anything with it, unless a malware is detected of course where you will have to choose what action to take with it.
So all in all, the everyday usage is amazing. It’s really easy to use and you will never have to bother with it for as long as your PC is safe.
Conclusion
Though a new contender in Antimalware market, MalwareFox is shaping up to be a decent solution with strong capabilities. Personally, I feel that it is an excellent choice because of the low resource consumption and still make sure your not infected with any malicious files
So my overall conclusion would be that if MalwareFox is not the best Anti-Malware that exists, then it’s definitely one of the best out there. Take a free trial now!
Sourojit is Executive Editor at Dealarious. Rumor says He is Computer Science Engineer; He neither accepts it nor denies it. Tech Explorer, Philosopher and a Storyteller.
I got infected by a Ransomware and I lost all of my files, unfortunately I did not had any backups. I removed the virus with MalwareFox but my files are still not back, anyone knows how I can get them back?
You can try using a decryptor or a data restoration program. Google it and you should be able to find something, but you must know that restoring or unlocking files is no small feat. Chances are that you won’t make it, good luck though.
Just how exactly does real-time protection works? And just how much can I depend on it?
As far as I know, real-time protection will actively scan all of the files that you have and those that you’re about to get. By that way an Anti-Malware will be able to detect a malicious application before it manages to infect you. I’m not sure about the exact definition but the overall purpose is to prevent your PC from getting infected, if you don’t have real-time protection the Anti-Malware will not detect the virus until you perform a scan and the virus has already infected your PC, so I think that real-time protection is a big deal if you ask me and it is something that you will want to depend on.
I’m actually confused with the false positive detection. What does that even mean? It gives false reports or something? I wouldn’t want my Anti-Malware to keep on bugging me with notifications for nothing.
I think that the author is referring to PUP’s here (potentially unwanted applications). A PUP is an application that might be harmful to your PC or something that you might want to remove, but in case that this is something that you want (which rarely is the case here) then the Anti-Malware will be giving you a false positive detection. At least that’s what I got from this.
That would make sense, I believe that the screenshot above shows the same thing where some Chrome extensions were marked as PUAs.
On the things that you don’t like you mentioned that it does not inspect websites. Doesn’t the real time protection protect you from things like that? I thought that this was the case, not to mention that this was the job of an Antivirus or of your built in Firewall that comes with Windows? Or your browser’s? Not too sure about that, I just can’t really see why it is pointed as something that you didn’t like when clearly it is not designed for this.
I think that regardless if that is its job or not, it’s still a disadvantage because it is unable to perform this function.