Remove Virus from USB/Pen Drive/PC/Memory Card With Linux

Remove Virus from USB/Pen Drive/PC/Memory Card With Linux

Download article as PDF

Disclaimer: This article is written on basis of author’s personal experiences and R&D. Any data loss or misbehavior of system is not responsibility of the authors.

The shortcut virus is commonly found is USB drivers and it replaces all the data with its shortcuts, means corrupt all the data. So you can imagine how dangerous it can be specially when you have very important data in your pen drive.

Scenario:

A few days before I encountered with this problem. I got a laptop of one of my friends. He asked me to install an OS into his Laptop. Windows 7 was pre-installed in that book. As I connected my pen drive with the laptop, all the data was disappeared and 3 strange types of files plus a shortcut to a folder (name similar to my USB) was showing me. I tried my level best to diagnose it via DOS commands and BLA BLA, but … no, nothing was there for me to get back. I am having 32 GB Pen Drive, which was used almost 85% at that moment (without any backup in my system). After a long R&D, I found following issues with that:

1. All my data was moved to a blank directory (folder), which was renamed as ‘   ‘ (here all name is consist of blank spaces), which is quite impossible in any Version of Windows OS including DOS
2. A shortcut was created with fake name similar to Volume name of my Pen Drive
3. ‘3’ unknown scripts/files created, which were detected by antivirus and removed

Steps to Recover:

Required Resources:

Before I start writing about steps, we must all resources which will be needed for this task

1. Linux Live CD/USB with NTFS/FAT/FAT32 Support, already burned on CD/USB
   1. My recommendation is SliTaz GNU Linux, which is already discussed in this forum in an article named as 8 of the Best Tiny Linux Distros (Download Link: http://www.slitaz.org/en/)
2. A PC with at least 512 MB RAM to run Live Linux OS with CD Boot Support
3. Infected Pen Drive
4. Finally common sense

Procedure:

1. Boot PC from CD-ROM (recommended) already burned with Live Linux OS (as discussed earlier)
2. After completion of OS loading, insert Pen Drive in PC and browse it via file browser
3. Delete the unnecessary & unknown files (if you are 100% sure, as I was at that moment) from of the Pen Drive
4. Linux can support renaming of blank spaces, rename the directory, and browse into it.
5. Cut the data and move it at its original place in Pen Drive
6. Remove infected folder from Pen Drive
7. Properly eject Pen Drive, and reboot system. 
8. Simply done