Virus which infects flash disk is a very common thing that happens in daily computing. This is probably because mostly people use flash disk to keep their data and tranfer them. This way of plugging in and out from a usb port is also very easy to get the flash disk infected by viruses.
The most common kind of virus, which antivirus usually detected on my flash disk is the virus that uses autorun.inf to invoke itself into memory. Sometimes, this kind of virus can be easily detected but rather hard to be removed. This kind of virus also infects harddisk and other media as well.
Normally, people use antivirus to remove viruses. But, I have ever met a situation where viruses can't be removed although it can be detected by antivirus. When we choose to delete the infected files or the virus file, it seems to be deleted. But a while later, it appears again. Really annoying!
The easiest way to remove virus is of course format the media which has been infected by the virus, if possible using a virus-free clean operating system such as Linux live cd. But this of course cost you a lot of time, and effort to reinstall the operating system as well as the programs. This is not really advisable unless it's the only way, because at least we need to back up the data on the media before formatting (usually this is harder when it happens to harddisk).
But the situation is different when it's on flash disk. If the virus is just an autorun-type virus, we can easily remove by using the formatting flash disk method. I have ever met that kind of situation. My antivirus could detect the virus that time but could not remove it cause it came back right after the deletion. So, I thought perhaps I should copy the data first. I did that smoothly, the data were transferred to harddisk and the antivirus detected the virus again. But the antivirus seemed to be able to stop the virus from infecting my harddisk. Luckily, I got the data without the virus.
After having the data copied, I formatted the flash disk, and this time I successfully removed the autorun virus from my flash. Then, I copied back the files which I had moved to my harddisk to the flash disk again. And that's how I removed the autorun virus on flash disk which could be detected, but couldn't be removed by antivirus.
LinkWithin
