Cyber security: Malwarebytes

“Malwarebytes has been an important part of the engineer’s toolkit for a long time.”

When faced with an infected machine, its ability to quickly clear out the infections that alternative software often missed made Malwarebytes a real competitor in the industry.

Growing from humble beginnings, it has now taken its place amongst the major players, ranking with the best.



Where it started

Malwarebytes is an American cyber security company which was unofficially established in 2004.

The CEO, Marcin Kleczynski, was still attending high school in Illinois when he decided to create his own company.

At that time, Marcin was a technician at a local computer repair shop.

This is where he would get the idea to create his own company, he was dealing with infected machines regularly and wondered if there could be a better preventative measure in place to avoid infections.

When his mother’s computer got infected, well known anti-virus software like ‘McAfee’ would not remove the malware causing the issues.

Kleczynski later stated, “I’ve never been as angry as when I got my computer infected”. His mother tasked him with resolving the issue “under penalty of death”, hopefully she wouldn’t have gone through with the threat, but Kleczynski was not willing to risk it.

Once he had fixed the household computer, Kleczynski took to the forum ‘Spywareinfo’.

In this forum he posted that he had learned how to remove the malware, it had taken him three days and was no easy task.

The forum was reasonably active at the time, so one of the editors took notice of Marcin’s achievement and the two became friends.

After Kleczynski’s post on the forum, he informally established Malwarebytes.

His new friend then convinced him to purchase an unused domain from them that was available.

RogueRemover

Kleczynski and one of the site’s regular users, Bruce Harrison, wrote an early version of the company’s software.

Then, in 2006 he teamed up with his roommate in college to manufacture a free to download program named ‘RogueRemover’.

RogueRemover is a tool which focuses on a type of malware called “rogue”, which manipulates users to send their bank details through a scam anti-virus software.

RogueRemover’s creation was one of the first steps to Malwarebytes’ development.

Kleczynski decided to set up his own forum for RogueRemover, allowing him to update and improve his software using feedback from the users.

Using RogueRemover’s software and the feedback from the forum, he developed Malwarebytes. 

Official establishment

Malwarebytes was officially launched on the 21st of January 2008 by Kleczynski and Harrison.

At the time of launch, Kleczynski was still studying computer science at the University of Illinois.

With Kleczynski as CEO, Bruce Harrison was appointed Vice President of the company.

The first employee hired was a man named Doug Swanson, who had experience in freeware development.

Then, an ex-employee of GreenBorder called Marcus Chung was hired as the chief operating officer.

It’s speculated that both Kleczynski and Harrison made $600,000 in their first year of selling the software, although they had not met each other personally at that time. 



Recent years

Since its release, Malwarebytes has been a useful tool for protecting companies, their hardware and with mobile devices.

Now, there is also a free version to be used on home computers as an extra safety measure to ensure there are no malware infections on the machine.

However, the paid package is still available for companies, to help with all kinds of infections and keeping their systems secure.

Having different packages on offer means that Malwarebytes is a useful program for anyone to have, we definitely recommend installing it to protect you and your devices.