Malware · guides

How to remove malware, device by device

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 10 September 2026 · 6 min read

This is the entrance to the malware tower. If something is wrong on your machine right now, do not read this page — go straight to removing malware from a computer, which is the guide to read while it is still happening. Everything else can wait an hour.

Almost nobody arrives here looking for protection. They arrive because a computer has started behaving strangely, or a browser opens on a page nobody chose, or an email says an account was used from a country they have never visited. The tower is built around that order of events: what to do now, what each kind of infection actually wants from you, and only then what is worth installing once the panic has passed.

Every floor will be written under the same two rules. What a security program does is quoted from the company that makes it, with the date we read it, because these suites change what they include from one year to the next. And nothing is ranked until we have paid for the licences and run them on real machines for two weeks — including the part that never appears in a comparison table, which is what the program costs you in speed and interruptions every single day.

Ten of the guides below are open; the rest are being built, and the boxes say which is which. Alongside them, two guides that belong in this building are already written elsewhere in the site: whether a Microsoft security alert is real and the three different faults behind pop-up ads.

Not covered here. It will not tell you the best antivirus. That verdict needs paid licences, real machines, weeks of ordinary use, and an honest account of what each program cost in speed and false alarms. A table of features copied from a press release is not a test, and this category is full of them.

It will not carry affiliate links. Security software pays generously for recommendations, and a great many of the comparison sites at the top of these searches are paid placements wearing the clothes of a review. That is precisely why a recommendation with no money attached to it is worth something, and why this tower is slower to produce one.

And it will not frighten you into installing anything. There is a whole industry built on the gap between how dangerous the internet feels and how dangerous it is for one ordinary person with an updated machine. Several floors here will exist mainly to close that gap, and the honest answer on more than one of them will be that you already have what you need and can stop reading. What holds instead is simple: no rankings until we have paid for the licences ourselves and run them for two weeks, and no affiliate links ever.