You publish 20,000 clean patches, but one goes wrong and you're a PC-crippler forever Security software maker Malwarebytes has emitted two product updates and apologised to users – after its code turned their machines into near-bricks. The problem started with a production update the company pushed out last Friday, which sent users to their keyboards complaining of excessive RAM and CPU consumption. Affected …
Every software vendor is going to have these cockups, where Malwarebytes let me down was there was no obvious place to get information, and no communication via the account email or the patching mechanism to acknowledge the problem or that it'd been fixed
So yeah, fuck ups happen, but lack of proactive communication is what costs you customers
Yeah, I got an emergency panicked call and had to uninstall MalwareBytes from someone on Saturday morning. Apparently by the time I was done, the update was pushed, but there was no way to actually update, because it was chewing up over 12 GB on a 4 GB laptop, continuously allocating more, and it took ten minutes to be able to kill the damn process via task manager, after first wasting time trying to stop the service cleanly. It's going to be a bit before I trust MalwareBytes again, I'm not going to reinstall it just because they say the one-off goof is fixed.
Seems a bit of an overreaction.
Name an AV vendor that has never dropped this particular bollock or a very similar one? I've seen AVG and kaspersky both quarantine bits of themselves after an update, I've had ESET cause mass blue screens, i've seen sophos do similar.
They copped to it, and fixed it. There aren't many better alternatives out there.
I maintain a couple of dozen PCs and I was seeing out of memory errors on high end machines with loads of RAM. I tried to research and fix and found.........very little or no info or any use. I've come to rely on them as part of our overall security strategy and this incident did much to destroy Malwarebytes goodwill.
Oh so THAT'S what was doing that.I thought it was Firefox.
This only happened to me in one machine, but it somehow screwed up Syncthing to the point where it shuts down every time I try to run it, even after a reinstall. Going to have to figure out how to do a clean reinstall next. Screw you very much, Malwarebytes.
And to think I recommended you. While you were doing this to me.
I mean, I've never used malwarebytes, but, yeah, come on now.
This seems to accidentally happen a lot to security suites. The question is, how does the company not power-on a PC a notice they can't do anything with it? How does this escape quality testing?
I mean, why wouldn't you roll this out to your company's own computers first? Are your employees not using this software on their personal machines at home? So many avenues this could have been discovered BEFORE your paying customers got screwed over.
I should just switch to Mac, they don't get viruses.....
HAH!
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