When it comes toantivirusprotection, you want a product that doesn’t fool around. If a malicious program turns up on your PC, you want the antivirus to smack it down and throw it into quarantine, no kid gloves required. Better yet, you want a tool so tough that malware doesn’t dare show its face. From the name, you might expect IObit Malware Fighter to be just what you need to combat existing and future malware infestations. You’d be wrong. In our testing, this product proved to be more pushover than protector.
How Much Does IObit Malware Fighter Cost?
You pay $39.99 per year for an IObit license, which is a common price point. Bitdefender, F-Secure, Trend Micro,Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, and others go for about that price. Admittedly, I have never seen a time when IObit wasn’t on sale for $19.99, but other products offer similar new-customer discounts. For $59.99 you can get a three-license subscription for Kaspersky, Bitdefender, and others. IObit is a little cheaper, $54.95 for three licenses. Got a ton of devices? WithMcAfee AntiVirus Plus, a $59.99 subscription lets you install protection on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household.
IObit does offer a free version of Malware Fighter, but it lacks bonus features and evensome central antivirus features(Opens in a new window). On top of that, it doesn’t include tech support. Given that the commercial edition fared so poorly in testing, I didn’t see a point in evaluating the free edition separately.
Getting Started With Malware Fighter
Take care when installing Malware Fighter. If you don’t pay attention, you can wind up also installing a bunch of bundled applications. It would have installed iTop VPN Free and iTop Screen Recorder Free if I hadn’t un-checked a pair of boxes on the first screen. I’d never heard of those products, but the installer devoted the whole next page to touting a free trial of the well-regardedDashlanepassword manager. After installation cameanotherbundled item, Drive Booster Pro. This level of bundled third-party products is uncommon in the antivirus realm, and not appreciated in a for-pay product.
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After the quick installation, IObit warned that I needed to run a database update, and that a smart scan was in order. Once I activated the installation with a registration code, it offered to turn on the Bitdefender malware scanning engine and the ransomware protection module, neither of which comes with the free edition. Don’t skip this step. This product really needs the help it gets from Bitdefender.
The product's main window uses a rich gray-blue background with minty green buttons. An animated status indicator dominates the middle, with a big Scan button below. At the left you find a vertical menu of icons, with explanatory tooltips that float into view when you point to each icon. The choices are: Home, Scan, Browser Protect, Security Guard, Tools, and Action Center. Icons at bottom right display the status of three protection engines: IObit's own antivirus and ransomware protection engines plus the engine licensed from Bitdefender.
IObit installs Browser Protect extensions in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. It loads in Internet Explorer automatically, but you need to take action to get the other extensions installed and enabled. The last time I looked at this product it failed to install the Chrome extension. This time around, all the installations went smoothly.
Note that the last menu item, titled Action Center, is just an upsell page encouraging you to install other products. IObit products in the list include Software Updater, Advanced SystemCare, Driver Booster, Uninstaller, and Smart Defrag. There are also links to install partner products including the VPN and screen recorder from iTop and the well-known Dashlanepassword manager.
No Help From Independent Labs
I always perform hands-on tests using real malware, but I’m happy to get detailed reports on antivirus capabilities from the big, independent testing labs. Getting good lab scores is important, but the mere fact that a product shows up in the reports is a plus. When a product appears in a lab’s report, it means the lab felt the product was worth evaluating, and the company felt participating in tests was worth the cost. I follow test scores from four big labs,AV-Comparatives(Opens in a new window),AV-Test Institute(Opens in a new window), MRG-Effitas, andSE Labs(Opens in a new window).
Avast, Kaspersky,Norton AntiVirus Plus,其他几个人出现在结果from all four labs. IObit, like about a third of the antivirus products I track, appears in none of the lab reports.
Each of the four labs uses a different scoring method. I've created an algorithm that maps all four onto a 10-point scale to produce an aggregate score. With 9.9 points, Kaspersky holds the best score among products tested by all the labs.Bitdefender Antivirus Plusalso has a 9.9-point aggregate score, but with results from just three labs. Also tested by three labs, AVG owns a perfect 10.
Malware Protection: From Decent to Dismal
With no lab results at all for Malware Fighter, I rely completely on my own hands-on tests. I don’t have the staff of researchers that the labs do, but I can challenge each product with real-world malware and analyze its success, or failure.
Mymalware protection测试开始当我打开一个文件夹,其中包含我的坏蛋rent collection of real-world malware samples. As with many antivirus tools, the minimal access that occurs when Windows Explorer displays the list of files proved sufficient to trigger Malware Fighter’s on-access malware detection. It detected 92% of the samples at this stage, in each case asking whether to remove the threat, leave it but deny access, or whitelist it. I always chose Remove threats, the default action.
下一阶段,我每个样本有发射past the shoot-on-sight initial culling. Malware Fighter caught a few more at this point, bringing its total detection percentage up to 94% and scoring 9.3 of 10 possible points. That’s a decent score, and better than the 8.8 points Malware Fighter earned when last tested. This score is actually better than what Bitdefender andKaspersky Anti-Virus(Opens in a new window)earned when challenged with the same set of samples. However, when my results don’t align with findings from the independent labs, I always defer to the labs.
At the top of the list isMalwarebytes Premium, with a perfect 10 points. Sophos and McAfee are close behind at 9.9 points, and Webroot managed 9.8.
Once I've spent the time and effort to gather, curate, and analyze a new set of malware samples, I necessarily use that collection for a good long while. To measure a product's effectiveness against the most current malware, I use a feed of recent discoveries supplied by London-based testing labMRG-Effitas(Opens in a new window). Typically, these malware-hosting URLs are no more than a few days old. I launch each of them in a protected browser, discarding any that have already gone dead. For those still active, I record whether the antivirus diverts the browser from the dangerous site, catches the malware during or just after download, or totally fails to prevent the malware download.
Out of 100 active malware-hosting URLs, Malware Fighter’s Surfing Protection caught precisely none, the same result as when I last tested this product. I observed one oddity—with IObit active, almost all the downloads started twice. I learned to just cancel the duplicate download and focus on the first one.
Malware Fighter caught just 36% of the malware payloads during the download process. That’s a dismal score. Only one recent product has scored lower, and the next-lowest score is more than twice Malware Fighter’s. Not only that, it actively reported the other 64% as safe, even ones tagged as malware by as many as 50 other antivirus products. In one very odd instance, one popup declared the download safe while simultaneously another popup identified it as a data-stealing Trojan.
The URLs for this test are different every time, but they're always the most recent. Very few products have scored lower than Malware Fighter, and many have scored much better. Bitdefender, McAfee, Sophos, andVipre Antivirus Plusall managed 100% protection in their latest tests.
Speeded-Up Scan
When you install an antivirus utility, you should always run a full scan at the start, on the chance that the system is already infected. After that, the real-time protection should keep out any new problems. Malware Fighter strongly encourages an initial scan. The status indicator on the main page won't go green until you at least run what it calls a Smart Scan. It also schedules a weekly Smart Scan, just in case real-time protection missed anything.
这个最新版本的一个报道,好处是faster scanning, and my testing supports that claim. The previous edition took nearly two hours to run a full scan, with a repeat scan finishing in about a half-hour. The current edition managed a full scan in 25 minutes and cut that time to just 11 minutes in a repeat scan.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure OnlinePhishing Protection Epic Fail
Malware Fighter's Surfing Protection didn’t block any malicious URLs, and when I last tested the product, it didn’t do anything about phishing either. This isn’t a case of phishing protection simply being absent. Malware Fighter’s description of Surfing Protection clearly states that itshouldfend off phishing pages.
Just what is phishing? Fraudsters create near-perfect replicas of sensitive websites and try to entice unsuspecting web-surfers to log in. The cleverest frauds capture those login credentials and pass them along to the real site, leaving the victim none the wiser. Once you’ve handed over your username and password, the fraudsters own your account. Some folks are clever enough torecognize these frauds, but for everyone else, a little help from the antivirus is in order.
For testing purposes, I gather the newest reported frauds I can find, aiming to include ones that are too new to have been widely blacklisted. I launch each simultaneously in four browsers. The product under test protects a browser instance with its internal phishing protection disabled, while the other three use phishing protection built into Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.
Just as in my previous test, Malware Fighter didn’t detect a single real-world phishing page. In fact, it actively marked those missed pages as safe. Quite a few of those it missed were caught by all three of the browsers. The only way I managed to see Malware Fighter’s phishing detection warning page was by using theAMTSO’s phishing detection test page(Opens in a new window).
At the other end of the spectrum,F-Secure Anti-Virus, McAfee, and Norton all managed 100% detection in their latest tests. Almost half of recent products scored 90% or better. Over my last several reviews, Malware Fighter’s phishing protection score has bounced between zero and barely above zero.
See How We Test Security Software
Poor Ransomware Protection
Like Bitdefender,Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security, and others, Malware Fighter includes aransomware protectioncomponent that works by blocking unauthorized access to your documents, images, and other files. For a sanity check on products that fight ransomware at the file-access level, I use a simple-minded fake ransomware program that simply XOR-encrypts all text files in the Documents folder, and a very simple text editor, both of which I wrote myself. Malware Fighter correctly detected both, even blocking the editor’s attempt toreada protected file.
To prepare for testing ransomware protection with real-world ransomware, I first turned off regular malware protection. I couldn’t turn off IObit’s own antivirus engine, but disabling the Bitdefender engine proved sufficient to keep real-time protection from wiping out most of my ransomware samples. Of my dozen real-world ransomware samples, the IObit engine eliminated three. I launched the surviving samples, one at a time, and noted the product’s reaction.
Three of the samples proceeded to encrypt essential files and demand their ransom, with no reaction at all from Malware Fighter. All but one of the remainder failed to operate correctly. Two of those locked up solid, rendering the test system totally unusable.
That leaves exactly one sample that Malware Fighter detected, and before that detection took place, the ransomware managed to encrypt over 500 files. Admittedly, these files weren’t located in protected folders, but the loss could still pose problems.
在我ransomware保护测试,我encountered products that fail when ransomware launches at startup. I tested that possibility using the one sample that Malware Fighter fought off successfully. I configured that sample to launch at startup and rebooted the test system. The ransomware clearly got to work right away, because this time around it encrypted over 7,000 files before Malware Fighter woke up and put a stop to the shenanigans.
It's clear that Malware Fighter istryingto keep files safe. Throughout my testing, I had to repeatedly tell it not to block my hand-coded analysis tools from accessing their own files. But when confronted with actual, sneaky ransomware, it just didn’t do well.
Bonus Tools
Malware Fighter comes with a substantial collection of bonus tools, many of which turn up on the Browser Protect page along with core features Download Protection and Surfing Protection. We’ve already seen that those two fared poorly in testing. Surfing Protection does mark up search results to show safe and dangerous links. You can also configure the product to protect web-based email and block ads.
Homepage Advisor and DNS Protect prevent unauthorized changes to your home page, default search, and DNS settings. The Anti-Tracking feature isn’t the same as the active tracker blocking found inAvast Free Antivirusand others. Rather, it deletes tracking cookies any time you close the browser. That leaves the feature labeled Anonymous Online, which is nothing more than an invitation to install a third-party VPN.
On the Security Guard page, you can enable or disable eight distinct types of protection, plus the Bitdefender antivirus engine. Don’t even think about turning off Bitdefender, though! File Guard checks files on access, USB Disk Guard scans any USB drives you mount, and Startup Guard forbids programs from setting themselves to install at startup without your permissions.
In a nod tospyware protection, Camera Guard warns you any time an unknown program tries to peek at you through your webcam. Actual viruses are uncommon these days, and disk-infecting Master Boot Record viruses even more so, but the MBR Guard adds a layer of protection against MBR viruses.
A few of the security guard components are harder to understand. A behavior-based detection component watches for Malicious Action, which makes sense. But Network Guard claims to block dangerous web pages; doesn’t Surfing Protection do that? Process Guard checks for malicious processes, something I would have thought real-time protection would handle.
Moving on to the Tools page, you see Safe Box, Sandbox, and Free & Fast VPN. The last item is yet another come-on to install the iTop third-party VPN. Sandbox is a safe, isolated arena in which you can launch suspect programs without risking permanent harm to your PC. Really, this feature is something a security researcher would use, not a normal consumer.
That leaves Safe Box. At first glance, I expected this feature to represent an encrypted container of some kind, like the vault feature in manysecurity suites. That’s not quite what it is. Putting a file “in” the Safe Box doesn’t move it. Rather, it hides the file from Windows Explorer and prevents both read access and write access. You can disable any of those three options, for example leaving Safe Box files visible and readable but banning changes. An actual encrypted vault would be more useful.
You can opt not to password-protect the Safe Box, and if you forget your password, Malware Fighter simply emails you a new one in plain text. That's a clear security fail. Other products do a much better job of protecting your important files.
Faster, Still Ineffective
IObit Malware Fighter Pro boasts a spiffy-looking user interface, but its malware-fighting abilities just don’t cut the mustard. No labs certify its abilities, and its detection of malicious and fraudulent websites totally whiffed, batting zero in testing. And while it includes a ransomware protection component, that component proved only marginally successful in testing. This edition did finish a full scan much faster than the previous edition, and it took a decent score in our malware protection test, but it’s still not a product we can recommend.
Bitdefender Antivirus PlusandWebroot SecureAnywhere AntiViruscost about the same as Malware Fighter and bring vastly more value.Kaspersky Anti-Viruscosts $59.99, but that gets you three licenses, and it, too, exhibits abilities way beyond those of Malware Fighter. For the same price as Kaspersky,McAfee Antivirus Pluslets you protect every device in your household. With these impressive Editors’ Choice products available, there’s no reason to spend your money on Malware Fighter.
IObit Malware Fighter Pro looks attractive and offers a collection of security tools, but it failed our malicious and fraudulent website tests and barely demonstrated ransomware protection.
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