How to Remove the pendrive virus that converts files and folders to shortcuts

This week I had an interesting experience. I connected my pen drive for personal use, that has all my digital life, the notebook from my cousin and he was infected by a virus.

All my folders and files were “processed” Shortcut, but, when clicking the shortcut, the original file or folder opens “normally”.

The conclusion that we have here is that the original folders and files still remain in the pen drive, then it is possible to recover them and remove this annoying virus.

The recovery procedure is very simple, but it must be run on a PC that is not infected. First of all you should ensure that the micro in which effect the cleaning also is clean (without this virus) and a good antivirus installed and updated.

Removing the virus

If you do not have an antivirus installed (that danger!), sugiro install or AVG AntiVirus Free. To me he is one of the best in this category, besides being free.

Run the antivirus and run a full scan on your pen drive. It will detect and remove the virus infected files. It is usually a file with extension “.vbs”.

Recovering files from pen drive “removed” virus

1. Open the Windows command prompt as administrator; Learn how the Windows 8 e no Windows 7.
2. Run the following command changing the drive letter of your USB Drives. In the example below the unit is “F:”. In your case can be “It:”, “G:” or any other letter. Check this before you run the command.
3. Enter: attributed-h-r-s-a / s / d F:\*.*
4. Tecle e aguarde. Depending on the amount of files and folders in pen drive this command can take quite. Wait until the end.

Soon, Now your folders and files must already be displayed correctly. Then we remove annoying shortcuts that were created by the virus.

5. Still at the command prompt, type the following command, remembering to change the drive letter of your pen drive:
6. Enter: of F:\*.lnk

How the virus works

This silly virus creates a copy of itself into the pen drive. It is a file with extension “.vbs”. It creates several shortcuts with the same name of the files and folders in the main directory of the flash drive, however, this created shortcut always points to the file with “.vbs”, passing as a parameter the correct path and name of the original folder or file.

Thus, every time you click the shortcut, file “.vbs” runs and, consequently, the virus is triggered. To ensure the guise, after executing the routines virus that has been programmed, it opens the original file or folder. So, people who do not understand much computer do not bother to find out what's happening, because, somewhat, continue accessing your files “no problem”.

Conclusion

I found this pretty dumb virus, it is very easy to detect that the flash drive is infected, but the idea is interesting, it ensures that the virus is always executed, because the owner of the pen drive always clicks the shortcut to access the desired file or folder.

Not jotted down variant of the virus that infected my pen drive and have not studied what the real purpose of it, but, probably, is a virus that monitors user behavior, or one that creates a zombie machine, or who picks up the database password, those things that most viruses do.

So that's. I hope you stay tuned as you begin to strangers shortcuts appear on your Pen Drive!