14 DAY TRIAL // Thousands of computers running Malwarebytes were rendered inoperable on Monday after the company released a faulty definitions update. The update in question was pulled within 8 minutes after being released, but 8 minutes was more than enough to cause some damage.
“I want to offer my sincere apology to our millions of customers and free users. I started this company because I thought everyone was entitled to malware-free computing. We acted overzealously in that mission and realize far superior procedures around updating are needed. More was expected of us, and we failed,” said Marcin Kleczynski, the founder and CEO of Malwarebytes.
“So what’s my promise to you? Working day and night, we are commissioning several new resources to stop this from happening again. We are building more redundancy to check our researchers’ work and improving our peer review.”
The company has released a fix tool and has published detailed instructions on how to address the issue.
Customers of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware have two ways to handle the problem, depending on whether they can boot their systems normally or not.
If they can boot their systems, all they have to do is download the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware FP Fix Tool and run it as an administrator. Users who can’t start their operating systems normally, should run the fix tool from Safe Mode.
Malwarebytes Enterprise Edition customers can also utilize the FP Fix Tool. In addition, they can try to restore their systems by reinstalling Malwarebytes Anti-Malware from within the console. They can execute the following command: "C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware \mbamapi.exe" /quarantine -restore all.
Those who can’t apply these steps without assistance, can contact the Malwarebytes Home User Support or the Business Support, depending on what products they have.