And with McAfee, you pay $59.99 per year to protect every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household. Sophos Home Premium goes for rather less $50 per year lets you install it on up to 10 devices (Windows or macOS). For $79.99 per year, you can protect five devices. Like Webroot, Kaspersky, Bitdefender, Trend Micro, and several others, Malwarebytes costs $39.99 per year to protect one Windows or macOS device. The current version, reviewed here, is Malwarebytes Premium 4.3. Version 2 came out a couple of years before that. The release of version 4 in 2019 was the first whole-number update since version 3 in 2016. Some companies assign a new product version every year, while others eschew product version numbers completely. It earned great scores in our hands-on tests and has begun to get good ratings from the independent testing labs as well. Behavior-based analysis is a must-have in this world, and Malwarebytes Premium offers exactly that, along with other layers of protection. Recognizing malware by just looking at files is utterly insufficient.

Today, though, we’re afflicted with polymorphic malware, pernicious ransomware, and other advanced attacks. Researchers even named some based on the number of bytes they’d add to an infected file. Those early viruses were predictable and easily detected using simple techniques. The earliest antivirus products specifically protected against computer viruses, programs that spread by injecting their code into other programs.

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