Malwarebytes still in Security & Privacy panel

No discussion is moot if you learn something from it.

Seeing as Malwarebytes was remaining and suspecting it had something to do with some of the new security procedures in macOS, I posted to this support site to gain insight on how to remove the stubborn Malwarebytes. I did this AFTER contacting Malwarebytes and received only canned instructions (which I had already followed). I knew darn well that restoring from a backup would resolve the issue.

I think you would have gotten a different response if you had led with that.

We didn't know you had already contacted MalwareBytes and tried all the recommendations that we would have suggested. You also might not be aware of how many truly off-the-wall posts we get whenever "malware" is the topic.

John Galt's snarky acerbic answers were not what I required. I required insight in the workings of the new security features and where a program like Malwarebytes might hide pieces of itself.

MalwareBytes isn't doing anything to hide itself. It is doing everything that it is supposed to be doing. When it comes to software installation and removal, MalwareBytes is one of the few that does it properly. That being said, all software has bugs. Maybe this was a bug in either MalwareBytes or, more likely, High Sierra.

I know John Galt isn't your favourite person right now. But given all that you've said about what you tried and what didn't work, John Galt's advice was right on the money the first time. It is true that, after you followed up, he did chime in with an "I told you so". But ultimately, I think your frustration may have led you to read more incivility and snarkiness into his replies than was ever really there.

I just found this topic, and I know it's a little old at this point, but just wanted to clarify a couple things.

First,

Yes CountryGirl56, I did run the uninstaller. However, it left system files. Some of these were in the staged extensions folder

Those files are not put there by Malwarebytes. Recent versions of macOS put kernel extensions there temporarily, except it doesn't seem that it's actually temporary, and they stay there long-term. That folder is not modifiable by anything other than macOS without disabling a security setting, so not only can Malwarebytes not put those files there in the first place, there's nothing that it can do to remove them. Those "staged" kernel extensions are not active in that location, however, so I wouldn't see it being a high priority to worry about them. You could do yourself more harm by disabling the security of your system in order to remove them than by leaving them to take up a small amount of disk space.

when I go to the Security & Privacy panel in the System Preferences, some times the General tab asks if I want to Allow the software from Malwarebytes Corporation. Why is this program still showing up in the Security & Privacy panel?

There are two possibilities. One is that the uninstaller didn't work properly. That could be due to a problem with your system, or could be that you used the wrong installer. If you tried to remove a recent version of the software - which includes its own bundled uninstaller - using an old Malwarebytes 3.0.x uninstaller, that won't work right.

If you still see the Malwarebytes kernel extension (which, in recent versions, is named MB_MBAM_Protection.kext) in the /Library/Extensions/ folder, then that's likely to be what happened.

The other possibility is a High Sierra bug, and unfortunately, there seem to be a number of High Sierra bugs involving that Allow button in Security & Privacy. Sometimes it doesn't show up when it's supposed to, sometimes it refuses to respond to clicks properly, and sometimes it doesn't actually allow the kernel extension as it's supposed to. Malwarebytes has no control whatsoever over the behavior of that Allow button.