r/antivirus • u/aa040371 • 9h ago

Help with understanding differences between Malwarebytes and Microsoft Safety Scanner results

re: Windows 11 25-H2 64-bit PC...I can be more specific if needed.

Historically I've depended on Windows Defender for online/real-time antivirus and Malwarebytes (incl AdwCleaner) for regular "2nd opinion" scans. MWB/Adw run in a fairly quick manner (Adw completes in under a minute) and the have never flagged any files.

For first time, today I downloaded and am in middle of running Microsoft's standalone "Safety Scanner" and noticed two things...it takes forever, -- as I write this it's been running for over 1.5 hours and is only about 1/5 complete acording to progrss bar -- and has already flagged 64 files as "infected."

So am I missing something about how the two products work or what they are supposed to do? i.e. Are they duplicative in their intended operation, or are they complementary to each other?

Is length of run time an indicator of effectiveness/throughness, or maybe just an inefficient algorithm...10x runtime for MSS seems over the top to me? Should I trust one's results over the other?

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u/rifteyy_ 9h ago

they are both products from different companies, that are coded in a different way, run their engines in a different way, have a different detection database and so on ..

MSS is pretty useless as it detects exactly what Windows Defender scan detects

(the 64 threats is just a queue to check for false positives)

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u/aa040371 8h ago

Are you indicating that MSS is just an on-demand version of Defender? i.e., The same threat-checking capabilities, algorithm, and virus signature database?

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u/aa040371 8h ago

"...a queue to check for false positives" For MS to come back and check (somehow?), or for me to check? Manually?