Why Is My Usb Flash Drive Indicating Files As Shortcuts

My PenDrive has been making shortcuts in itself and I've lost my data because of it. How do I go about removing this virus?

** To gain temporary access to your pen drive files**Open Start Menu/Start Screen, search for 'Command Prompt'. When it comes up, right click the icon and click on 'Run as Administrator'.You should get a black screen with a white prompt and blinking dash.Let's say your pendrive letter is G:\.There type in "G:" (without quotes) and press Enter.Now type in the following and press Enter"attrib * -h -s /d /s" (again without quotes)Now you might have to wait for a while until the blinking dash reappears.Then type this and press enter:"del *.lnk"Now open your pen drive in Windows Explorer. You should see a folder with no name. Open it and you should get the contents of your pen drive there. Move all the contents to the main folder (root) of the pen drive.Now if you had double clicked any of the shortcuts in the past your computer is surely infected and every time you reinsert the pen drive, the shortcuts will reappear. To disinfect your computer you have to perform the following steps.** To remove the virus completely**Install this software: Dr. Web Cureit (http://www.freedrweb.com/cureit/...)Open it and run a full scan (not an express scan). After some time you will get the results and it will ask you what to do with them. Click on Fix/Remove or any similar option that comes up.Then finally restart your computer.Now after starting up again you will see that reinserting the pen drive doesn't make the shortcuts reappear.Congrats! You just manually removed the shortcut virus!

When I open my pen drive in my PC it shows a shortcut of the pen drive in it. Why? Why is this problem happening if I formatted the pen drive? What should I do to solve this?

This is happening surly because of Malware but like others i will not suggest you to buy any Anti virus solutions as many fails in recognising this.This mainly happens because of vb scripts.To see the original files surly you can enable the option “show hidden files” in folder option from control panel.However to remove the root cause you need to search for the that Vbs file which causing it.Simply go to task manager process tab and check the option show process from all users and search for any unknown process and wscript.exe process don't end the process, right click and select the open file location option, now minimise that window and now try to end the process if it stopes great now go and delete that file. However many times you won't be allowed to stop in that case stop the root process that is vbscript having a cube icon as below.Now enjoy…. If dont want this to repeat format your pendrive and stop taking stuffs from your friends affected pc or switch to any linux distro and do whatever you want :p

All the files in my USB turned to shortcuts. How can I recover them?

All your files are there in your USB drive. You just need to unhide them so don’t try to format the drive.Follow these simple steps to Unhide the real files :Open My computer and click on organize button in top left corner as shown in the image below. Other option go to Control Panel and Select Folder and Search options.Then click on Folder and Search options. A new dialog box will appear in front of you. In that click on the View tab then you will see options as shown below in point 3.Now click on Show Hidden files, folders and drives, then uncheck these three options:Hide empty drives in ComputerHide extension for known file typesHide protected operating system files .Then click on Apply and OK.After that you will see some hidden folders in your USB drive. These folders will not have Shortcut signs so open them you will find your data.And about the shortcuts, they are coming because you have some rootkit/worm in your Users folder in C drive (Operating System’s Drive). Scan that folder with any good antivirus and you will find the virus.This way in future it will not convert all your folders in USB drives to shortcuts.You can change the settings after you are done or you can keep it like that, your decision.Goodluck!!!Both the Images are taken from google.

Do all USB thumb drives need an master boot record? Why?

Yes and no. Technically there’s no requirement of any specific byte of data on a thumb drive, or any storage media at all. And, in some very specific use purposes, there might not be an MBR on a thumb drive.However, all modern OSs require some form of partition table to allocate the space and indicate expected file system type. MBR is just one such scheme. There are others such as GPT which is used by Apple and even by Windows for larger drives and data storage pools. MBR is the smallest such scheme, taking up just the size of a single 512byte sector, so it makes sense for a thumb drive.MBR does have some limitations, such as only allowing 4 total partitions and not allowing for partitions larger than 2Tb, but that’s not typically an issue on a thumb drive.So the bottom line is, no, it technically doesn’t need to have an MBR, but if you plan to use it normally on your computer you’ll need a partition table of some sort and MBR just makes sense for the application.

Since last windows update the automatic opening of folders on inserted USB drives has stopped even though all settings are correct. Why?

I just did a system restart and it now works. Strange…

Computer Viruses: How does the SHORTCUT Virus in windows spread and who is the creator of this notorious, albeit highly resilient, virus?

How does the SHORTCUT Virus in windows spread: USB-borne malware is extremely common, and most malware that propagates via USB and other removable drives traditionally has taken advantage of the Windows Autorun or Autoplay feature.This strain of malware leveraged a vulnerability in the method Windows uses for handling shortcut files.Shortcut files — or those ending in the “.lnk” extension — are Windows files that link (hence the “lnk” extension) easy-to-recognize icons to specific executable programs, and are typically placed on the user’s Desktop or Start Menu. Ideally, a shortcut doesn’t do anything until a user clicks on its icon. But it was found that these malicious shortcut files are capable of executing automatically if they are written to a USB drive that is later accessed by Windows Explorer.“So you just have to open infected USB storage device using [Windows] Explorer or any other file manager which can display icons (for i.e. Total Commander) to infect your Operating System and allow execution of the malware,”“rootkit” files are used to  hide the malware itself so that it remains invisible on the USB storage deviceI think it was called W32.Stuxnet | Symantec. You can click on this link and see the each and every technical details about the virus.who is the creator of this notorious, albeit highly resilient, virus: Jointly built American-Israeli cyber weapon. Anonymous US officials speaking to the Washington post claimed the worm was developed during the administration of Barack Obama to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program with what would seem like a long series of unfortunate accidents.Details from nytimes: WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyber weapons, according to participants in the program.Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.Source: Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran Wiki source: Stuxnet

Is there a way to refer to a USB-mounted mass storage device on a Windows PC via a path string or from command line when it does not have a drive letter mapping, like a path could be: Z:\USB, but of course here we can’t say Z to refer to a drive?

If the USB is formatted as NTFS you can mount it to a folder path instead of a drive letter. E.g. instead of it becoming something like the F: drive, you could mount it to a folder path like C:\Users\\Documents\USBDrive (or whatever you prefer).I.e. it is possible to mount these in a similar way to how Linux / macOS / Unix (and nearly all other OSs) do. Though it’s only available for NTFS (not any sort of FAT), and you have to do this manually in Windows’ Disk Management tool (in the Control Panel - or through command-line). It’s definitely not the default way.You also need to do this for every computer you’re plugging this drive into. The setting is saved in the computer, not onto the drive.An alternative (much easier) way would be to use either shortcuts (not so useful in all cases) or symbolic links (hardly ever causes trouble). These could work on any drive, no matter the format. However, you’d end up with both the path and the drive letter. Since all that you’re really doing is mounting the drive normally, and then placing a reference pointer somewhere which redirects to that drive letter.