There is no reliable information about Malabar Civet's habitat use or other aspects of its ecology. The several descriptions of habitat use are speculative or based in whole or part on confusion with other species. It seems that it once inhabited lowland forests, lowland swamp and riparian forests in the coastal plain districts of the Western Ghats. Village reports suggested occurrence in thickets in cashew plantations and in highly degraded lowland forests in northern Kerala (Ashraf et al. 1993). It could possibly occur in lowland riparian forests in the coastal plain districts (Ashraf et al. 1993). Based on the natural history of congeners, the species is probably nocturnal, ground-dwelling and readily camera-trapped when present.

Natural forests have completely disappeared from the coastal Western Ghats. Present vegetation is secondary in origin (Champion and Seth 1968), and is mostly plantations (Ashraf et al. 1993). Of these, cashew plantations are the least disturbed, because they are not weeded, providing a dense understorey of shrubs and grasses for this ground-living species to take refuge in (Ashraf et al. 1993). The pelt records from 1980-1990 were in the region of river valleys, suggesting a possible association with shallow water courses (Ashraf et al, 1993). The closely related Large-spotted Civet is strongly associated with the forested level lowlands (e.g., Chutipong et al. 2014); whether this is also true of Malabar Civet, which occurs within a rather different small carnivore community (notably, no other species of Viverra overlaps with it) is unknown.

Malabar Civet is believed to be endemic to the Western Ghats of southern India. All records lack precise locality (historical specimens all came from zoo animals with no information on original source) and most have little or no information on origin. Taken together they suggest a distribution in the lowlands from Kanyakumari in the extreme south north to Wayanad, Coorg, and Honnavar in Karnataka (Pocock 1933, 1939, Corbet and Hill 1992, Nandini and Mudappa 2010). There are only two reports of its occurrence in the higher elevations (over 600 m) of the Western Ghats, in the High Wavy Mountains (Hutton 1949) and at Kudremukh (Karanth 1986). The former is very likely to be in error and the latter was based on a single-observer sight-record left unidentified for some years (Nandini and Mudappa 2010). By the late 1960s, the species was thought to be near extinction. In the decades until the late 1980s, there were only two possible records, from Kudremukh in Karnataka (Karanth 1986) and from Tiruvella in Kerala (Kurup 1989); both lack objectively verifiable evidence. Rai and Kumar (1993) reported possible occurrence in the state of Karnataka based on the sighting by Karanth (1986) and unsubstantiated interviews with local hunters. In the late 1980s, skins of recently killed Malabar Civets were obtained in Elayur, in the lowland Western Ghats, in Malappuram district, Kerala (Kurup 1989) and near Nilambur, northern Kerala (Ahsraf et al. 1993), although these seem subsequently to have been lost.

Malabar Civet is listed in Schedule I, part I of the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and on CITES Appendix III (India). This species is not known to occur in any protected area and the declaration of large new protected areas in its range is unlikely because of the dense human populations (Ashraf et al. 1993). Ashraf et al. (1993) recommended the following conservation actions for this species: captive breeding (with the possibility of reintroduction if suitable undisturbed areas are identified), field surveys (to investigate whether this species occurs in protected areas) and ecological studies (to determine the threats to this species). An urgent conservation action plan is needed. Given that recently it has been not possible to find the species at all, the option of captive breeding is not currently practical. Reintroduction, assuming that some environmental threats have dissipated the populations, it would need considerable amount of work to nullify those threats having firstly established what they are. Field survey should be continued, although many in the last decade have not yielded any positive results (Jayson et al. 2007, Rao et al. 2007, Ashraf et al. 2009). As noted by Nandini and Mudappa (2010) in a detailed review of the knowledge of the Malabar Civet, none of the historical specimens have reliable provenance; and even for the more recent ones it is fairly vague: not one has a precise wild locality of origin. It therefore is imperative to assess the status of the specimens in various museums and collections using advanced techniques of molecular genetics. This should consider whether the species is in fact a valid taxon native to India, or an incidental result of the wide trans-shipment of various civet species that occurred around the Indian Ocean counties for many centuries.