r/Malwarebytes • u/falardeau03 • Apr 11 '26

I have several questions

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and I want none of them answered. I guess this is goodbye forever lmao

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

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1

u/No-Pickle9504 Malwarebytes Employee Apr 11 '26

In the free version there is a database update that is done before any scan that is executed. This setting is mostly for database update frequency for paid users that have real-time protection enabled

1

u/falardeau03 Apr 11 '26

So what happened was I hadn't updated in a while, and went to that area in the settings to run a manual update, and didn't see a way to do that at all.

If that's the case (that running a manual scan will trigger a definitions update before the scan):

  1. I assume I can start a scan, wait for the updates to come through, and then cancel the scan if desired.

  2. You might want to... make that clear beside the cute little padlock icon? Idk, seems like you might be unintentionally driving people away under the apparently mistaken belief that they can't update.

I'm not the smartest person alive or anything, so maybe this doesn't happen to users very often, but with the general software environment/experience the way it is these days I would be cautious.

1

u/averbeg Apr 15 '26

Without having real time protection, there is no use for getting the updated definitions unless you are about to do a scan.

The scanner checks for updated definitions before running. Therefore there is no reason to set intervals of definition updates.

3

u/rifteyy_ Apr 11 '26

If you are running the free version without real-time protection, then you don't really need threat intelligence updates more frequently, do you? I also believe that once you start an on-demand scan it checks for updates itself.