Scan Computer for Malware Using Chrome Browser

Google Chrome web browser can now scan and remove harmful software from your computer. For this, Google has joined hands with the popular security firm ESET (the makers of ESET NOD32 Antivirus). Chrome browser can ask you to check and remove unwanted programs from your PC on its own. But you can also manually run this anti-malware scan yourself from the Chrome browser settings. Here is how:

  1. Launch Chrome web browser and make sure it is up-to-date. (To run a quick update scan, you can enter chrome://settings/help in the Chrome address bar and it will auto-update the browser to latest version).
  2. Click on the menu icon in the top-right corner (three vertical dots) and select Settings from the menu.
  3. In the settings, scroll down to the very bottom and select Advanced.
  4. On the next screen, again scroll down to the very bottom and select Clean up computer.
  5. You can also just enter chrome://settings/cleanup in your Chrome browser’s address bar instead of following steps 2 to 4.Chrome Scan Harmful Software
  6. Click Find displayed next to “Find and remove harmful software”.
  7. It will scan your computer in the background and may take a long time before showing you the results. If it asks you to remove the found malware, click on Remove to get rid of malware. If it does not find anything, then you will see the message – “No harmful software found”.Chrome Scan Harmful Software

Chrome uses ESET’s anti-virus engine and malware database to scan your PC for the harmful software. If you do not want Chrome’s in-built anti-malware to scan for malware for you, you can use the free ESET Online Scanner to scan and remove the possible malware from your PC.

You can read more about this new security feature of Chrome web browser as well as what kind of data is collected or sent to Google servers for scanning purposes at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2765944.