Malwarebytes evidently attacked by a virus.

This is not exactly a “Mundane Pointless” item, but I couldn’t figure where else to put it.

I have a Dell Computer, with Windows 7 (with all the upgrades) and 8 gigs of RAM. Yesterday I got a message that memory was low, and I’d better free up some. They weren’t kidding, as the computer immediately was slowed down until it was basically unusable. After restarting several times, I was able to open a program “System Explorer” that shows the memory usage of all programs currently running (there are a lot!). Anyway, it found the culprit - a part of the Malwarebytes suite of software, named “MBAMService.exe” was using over 6 gigs of memory instead of its normal 279,000 K of memory. Additionally, I was unable to either kill the process or delete the program, receiving an “access denied” message whenever this was tried.

I was able to get things running again by using my goto solution to most problems, the “System Restore” routine, and that fixed the problem, with all running OK now.

I have noticed that Malwarebytes is a program that is often mentioned here as a good defense against malware, but that it had spectacularly failed in this case. I was wondering if any of you folks had run into this problem, and what your solution had been.

I recommend that you update Malwarebytes. From BleepingComputer.com, “An update pushed by Malwarebytes today for their Malwarebytes Anti-Malware product has caused a lot of problems for those who use their program. This new protection update caused mbamservice.exe to consume a lot of memory and upwards to 90% of the computer’s CPU. A new update has been pushed that resolves these issues.” That was posted yesterday.

It wan’t affected by malware. It was a buggy update.

I ran into the exact same problem yesterday.

I couldn’t get to task manager so I rebooted, then same thing happened, so next reboot I brought up task manager and left it running sorted by mem. I noticed the malwarebytes icon in the lower right like it ws trying to do something, but it never used up too much mem once task mgr was visible to me.

I did not do a restore and it has not happened again.

These are the things I did that I thought might have allowed something to get in:
1 - Went to Forbes.com for an article and turned off adblock plus for that site
2 - Downloaded an open source html editor 2 weeks ago (bluegriffon)
3 - Downloaded an open source graphics engine 2 weeks ago (jmonkeyengine)

Did you do anything recently similar to any of these?

Thanks, this is good news.

Thanks, folks. That was interesting and fast! That’s me, always at the forefront of screw-ups. I guess I’d better upload the fix ASAP.