McAfee Ransomware Interceptor

Ransomware is a difficult type of malware to prevent and remove due to the versatility of ransomware agents. This is why certain, traditional antivirus applications might fail. In this case, you can resort to programs specially designed to identify and stop ransomware from ever reaching your system.

McAfee Ransomware Interceptor (MRI) represents McAfee's attempt at handling these type of threats. It's a lightweight tool that requires no configuration and silently runs in the systray, without disturbing your with unnecessary notifications.

The setup operation might take a while, and there are two setup files available for each architecture type, so make sure to run the installer that corresponds to your system. A computer reboot is mandatory to proceed further and get the MRI working properly.

McAfee Ransomware Interceptor creates an icon in the systray every time you turn on your computer and turns on the real-time guard at default, in order to detect and block ransomware without having to ask for permission. Unless this isn't clear by now, the program is not designed to remove ransomware if the computer is already infected.

From the right-click menu of the systray icon, it's possible to temporarily stop the real-time engine as well as to exclude any EXE file from MRI's scanner by adding it to a whitelist. However, a whitelist manager hasn't actually been implemented up to this point, which means that the process cannot be reversed, so protected files cannot be unprotected if you change your mind.

Unfortunately, MRI's engine was disappointing in our evaluation, seeing how it failed to pick up on any ransomware agents we threw at it, whether they were unzipped from password-protected archives, clicked on, or even launched. By comparison, Windows Defender quickly reacted in all these scenarios. It seems that McAfee Ransomware Interceptor needs more work in order to become a reliable antiransomware application.