Natwest And Malwarebytes Team Up To Provide Free Virus Protection

Customers of National Westminster (NatWest) Bank are now eligible to receive a free copy of Malwarebytes Premium subscription for up to 10 devices.

NatWest is a prominent British banking giant with upwards of 7.5 million personal banking customers and 850,000 small business accounts.

In a press release, Alasdair MacFarlane, the Head of Fraud Prevention at NatWest, stated that the bank has partnered with Malwarebytes to provide free virus protection to its customers.

“Keeping our customers safe and secure is of paramount importance to us. We are the only UK bank to offer premium virus protection to our customers for free and are working with Malwarebytes to deliver this,” MacFarlane announced to customers.

The announcement comes at a time when cyberattacks are on the rise, and stories of ransomware operators targeting large corporations have become an everyday nuisance.

“Providing digital protection, productivity, and peace of mind to customers is increasingly critical for companies and consumers as the threat landscape continues to rapidly evolve,” said Marcin Kleczynski, CEO of Malwarebytes, in a joint announcement.

“Malwarebytes has been a champion of security since our inception and we’re thrilled to be able to partner with innovative, socially responsible organizations like NatWest Group who are going above and beyond to ensure the safety of their customers,” Kleczynski continued.

Thus far, NatWest has seen over 100,000 downloads of the premium antivirus protection from its customers, which is an encouraging statistic.

The banking group has further plans to boost security awareness and malware protection adoption rates among its customers. 

The offer is also available to customers of sister banks, Royal Bank of Scotland, Isle of Man Bank, NatWest International, and Ulster Bank.

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How to get the free Malwarebytes Premium offer

If you are a NatWest customer, you can get Malwarebytes for free by following these steps:

1. Open up the www.natwest.com web site and log in to your account.
2. Once logged in, click on the “Security” tab on the left-hand side panel. Scroll down to the “Download Malwarebytes Premium” section. 
3. Upon clicking the “Get your Malwarebytes coupon code,” you will be shown a coupon code which can be applied towards a Malwarebytes premium license.
    
4. On further clicking on the “Create your Malwarebytes account” link, you will be redirected to a page prompting you to sign up for a or sign in to an existing Malwarebytes account.
    
5. Once you have signed up for an account (or signed-in with an existing one), you can paste the coupon code in the corresponding field that appears on the following page:
6.  On clicking “Activate subscription.” after entering a valid coupon code, a license key for your Malwarebytes Premium will be generated on the page that follows.
   
   As evident from the image below, the license issued covers up to 10 devices, which can be running Windows, Apple iOS/OS X operations systems, Android, and Chrome OS.
   Be sure to click the “Activate” button and follow up with any verification emails which may be sent for newly created Malwarebytes accounts.
7. Now click the “Download” button on the same page to get a copy of Malwarebytes. Once downloaded, launch the executable to install Malwarebytes on your computer.
8. The installation wizard will prompt you to choose one of the different plans (free, trial, premium). Click the “Activate license” button under Malwarebytes Premium.
9.  On this screen, you would enter the license key, which was generated in step 5. And further, click the “Activate” button.

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And that’s it! Your device now enjoys the premium protection of Malwarebytes at no cost. Try running a scan by clicking on “Scan” to see if the program detects any malicious files.

Note, in some cases, for example, on Mac OS X devices, you may be prompted to optionally grant the application Full Disk Access before total protection can be enforced.

If this happens, grant the application the necessary permissions as you usually would to a trusted application.