Personally I feel this Global Exclusions should be used with great caution as it ‘says on the tin’ these are Global Exclusions and will also apply to the on-access scanners not just what it was before ‘Exclusions’ that only applied to the on-demand scans.
I believe because of that subtle change the old on-demand ‘Exclusions’ weren’t reinstated.
I initially reinstalled some my old exclusions and did some testing to confirm that it allows execution of files in a globally excluded folder.
The main issue is that it doesn’t allow you to drill down to file level, stopping at folder level and you end up with a wildcard * after the folder name, this excludes all files in that folder and sub-folders. This can leave a large hole in security if you don’t exercise care when using wildcards. Or better still only exclude at file level by copying and pasting the full path into the new global exclusion.
If your talking about settings/global exclusions then you can’t add sub files to that, only the parent folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware is able to be added there.
If your only wanting to exclude the exe files themselves you would need to do that in the file shield settings/exclusions and note that since some of the recent changes within Malwarebytes you would also need to exclude this folder (mbamscheduler.exe) as it has given some people problems until it was excluded.
Well that goes against what the wildcard has been in the past and I see nothing to say that the wildcard doesn’t also exclude sub-folders, because it still does.
I have a folder with samples, tools, etc. that I didn’t want scanned, image1 and that had sub-folders in it, image2.
I then executed the eicar.com test file in one of the sub folders and it sailed right through and no alert.
As I said you have to exercise care if using the wildcard, you have to be more selective or it opens a large hole in security.
What I meant David by not being able to exclude subs in the global exclusions was if you click on browse in global exclusions and search for say the mbam exe file mentioned in this thread then it will not be visible and hence cannot be applied, it was a slight wrong wording on my part as sub folders yes you can but you can’t individually add the exe files to Global/Settings.
Yes, no problem drilling down to sub-folder level by clicking the plus icon to the left of the main folder.
Users can subsequently modify the entry, as shown in my previous images in restricting it to a file type or by replacing the * for the executable file name.
The main point is that people have top exercise care when using the Global Exclusions.
