What Happened to the Malwarebytes Offline Database?

Malwarebytes is the most popular and effective antivirus and antimalware application on the internet. You used to download an offline database to update Malwarebytes manually if needed, but that's no longer the case.

Somewhere in June of 2020, Malwarebytes no longer made the offline update available for download. We can't find any mention of why but the direct file link no longer works. Our best explanation that they prefer you to download updates in the program via the cloud. Malwarebytes now updates every hour to keep you protected, again, eliminating the need for an offline databse.

Over the years, how you updated changed. you used to copy rules.ref, and or database.conf from any updated Malwarebytes installation. That was replaced with mbam-rules.exe, which would update your Malwarebytes with the free updater. At the time of this article, we're unaware of any file we can share that allows you to copy and paste a file to update manually.

Adding to the confusion is a couple of websites that keep updating the dates of their "offline database" when all they're really doing is trying to set a cookie for affiliate sales. We compared our last-released file to the competition "updated" database three months later, and the file size is identical. So, don't bother downloading an offline database from third-party websites - the cake is a lie.

To update Malwarebytes now, you can right-click on the Malwarebytes system tray and click on Check for Updates. If you don't use the system tray icon, open Malwarebytes, click on the gear icon for settings, and click on Check for updates under General.

If your computer is infected for some reason, you might be having trouble updating, although that is not as common a problem as it used to be if Malwarebytes is kept up to date.

In this case, we recommend booting into Safe Mode with networking and try updating.

Download Malwarebytes here.

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