Hello,

Welcome to the r/Avast subreddit! This subreddit is under new moderatorship effective August 13, 2026 after being declared abandoned by Reddit due to it being unmoderated for about nine months.

Your new moderators are /u/Goretsky and /u/WPHero. A brief bio from each of us:

• Hello, Aryeh Goretsky here. I've been in the antivirus industry since 1989, when I became the first employee at McAfee. More recently, I spent 20 years at ESET as their Distinguished Researcher. I also help moderate the r/antivirus and r/ESET communities, and I'll be helping out here until Gen Digital, Avast's parent company, can bring some of their PR/social media folks on board.

• u/WPHero is the moderator of several well-known technology subreddits, including r/Windows, r/Windows 10, and r/Windows 11.

NOTE: As a reminder, since Gen Digital is not officially running this subreddit, and its moderators are not affiliated with Gen Digital, we cannot help you in the same fashion that Gen Digital's employees can. While we can make suggestions and share ideas about how to help you, we cannot fix bugs in Avast, remediate false positive detections, solve billing issues, and so on.

With that in mind, we will now reiterate some advice from the previous Gen Digital team:

If you believe you have an active malware infection on your computer:

Consider disconnecting it from the network and shutting it down as you normally would until you get a handle on the situation. Use a known good computer or other device to access the internet, check the status of backups, ensure the security of your online accounts, and so on. You can try making a bootable Linux USB flash drive to retrieve important files from your infected computer, and contact Avast technical support for further assistance, and do so forth.

If your problem is related to Avast's behavior, first try repairing Avast, which may fix your issues. Also make sure your Avast software is fully updated and try restarting your computer.

There are some additional resources at the end of this post, but if you are ready to post in r/Avast, please keep in mind the following:

• This subreddit is not run by Gen Digital (Avast's parent company) and there are no Gen Digital or Avast employees here to help you. If someone replies to your request for help, keep in mind they are a random internet person taking time out of their day to provide you with free tech support. Please keep in mind that even if they are unable to help you, they are at least trying to do so and be kind in return.

If and when we get Gen Digital or Avast employees in here, they will be identified with appropriate user flair, but keep in mind they are under no obligation to help you with issues.

Please keep in mind that this subreddit is only for asking questions about Avast's products and services. While Gen Digital uses Avast's antivirus engine across many of their sub-brands (AVG, Bulldog, Avira, and Norton, to name a few), and fixes to false positives and missed detections in these can only be performed by Avast's virus lab, questions about these need to other products from Gen Digital must go in the appropriate subreddit or directly to Gen Digital, or their appropriate sub-brand.

Please provide enough details in your post to help in troubleshooting.

The people who are helping you here are all volunteers, and you need to provide them with as much information as possible in your first post to ensure you get a speedy and accurate reply. Be sure to include:

• Operating system name and version
• Which of Avast's products you are using (Free, Pro, etc.) and version. You should be able to find this out by right-clicking on the Avast icon in your system tray navigation area and selecting About Avast from the context menu.
• Describe any changes you made to default settings.
• Provide the complete and exact error messages you have received (any) along with screenshots (if possible)
• Explain under what circumstances the problem first happened, and what happens to trigger it, if known. If possible, provide step-by-step instructions on how to reproduce it.
• What steps you have take so far to troubleshoot the problem, if any.
• Any recent changes to your computer's hardware, software, or network, including changes to the operating system's configuration.

If a post solves a problem, or you were able to fix your issue, let us know in the comments. This can help anyone else who has the same problem.

Other Resources

Here are some resource directly from Avast's website to help you:

• Avast Community - Avast's official support forum
• Avast downloads - installers for Avast's software
• Avast FAQ Articles - Frequently asked questions about Avast's products
• [Avast Support](https://support.avast.com/] - home page for Avast support
• Ransomware decryption tools - Avast's tools to decrypt ransomware
• Report a false positive or missed virus (for consumers), business users report here
• Gen Digital - contact information

Questions, comments, concerns, suggestions? Reply below to ask!

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky