How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

For software level malware: Sure, wiping the hard drive is fine. To be extra sure, overwrite the entire hard drive with 0s manually using a secure erase tool.

For hardware level malware: Well... no. These things live in the actual firmware of your PC and will reinfect your hard drive every time.

For periphery level malware: Now this is a much deeper hole to dive into, but the gist of it is that something else on the network is infected, and will infect you too. This most commonly happens with routers, but if this sort of attack was already happening you'd see weird page redirects, odd DNS settings, and bad behavior on your entire network.

Now out of the truth of the matter: You probably only have software level malware, if any, which is easy to fix. Just reformat, secure erase, and reinstall. Have fun!

How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

For OS level malware: Sure, wiping the hard drive is fine. To be extra sure, overwrite the entire hard drive with 0s manually using a secure erase tool.

For hardware/firmware level malware: Well... no. These things live in the actual firmware of your PC and will reinfect your hard drive every time.

For periphery level malware: Now this is a much deeper hole to dive into than OS level and not as bad as the firmware level, but the gist of it is that something else on the network is infected, and will infect you too. This most commonly happens with routers, but if this sort of attack was already happening you'd see weird page redirects, odd DNS settings, and bad behavior on your entire network.

Now out of the truth of the matter: You probably only have OS level malware, if any, which is easy to fix. Just reformat, secure erase, and reinstall. Have fun!

How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

For software level malware: Sure, wiping the hard drive is fine. To be extra sure, overwrite the entire hard drive with 0s manually using a secure erase tool.

For hardware level malware: Well... no. These things live in the actual firmware of your PC and will reinfect your hard drive every time.

Now out of the truth of the matter: You probably only have software level malware, which is easy to fix. Just reformat, secure erase, and reinstall. Have fun!

How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

For software level malware: Sure, wiping the hard drive is fine. To be extra sure, overwrite the entire hard drive with 0s manually using a secure erase tool.

For hardware level malware: Well... no. These things live in the actual firmware of your PC and will reinfect your hard drive every time.

For periphery level malware: Now this is a much deeper hole to dive into, but the gist of it is that something else on the network is infected, and will infect you too. This most commonly happens with routers, but if this sort of attack was already happening you'd see weird page redirects, odd DNS settings, and bad behavior on your entire network.

Now out of the truth of the matter: You probably only have software level malware, if any, which is easy to fix. Just reformat, secure erase, and reinstall. Have fun!