A strange occurance, one I have never seen before, certainly, even though I have worked with computers for years now.
A friend of mine, like most people these days, has a flash pen drive. Storing 1Gb of memory it worked fine until the day her company decided to issue computers without any basic firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware and server protection software. (Windows XP Standard SP2 Laptop)
Needless to say within a few minutes on the web, they were swamped by viruses. The pen drive was used to transfer some word files and folders during the time of infection, unknowingly to the latter.
The computer was later cleansed, however the pen drive remains problematic.
Now, whenever you plug it into ANY computer, it appears in my computer, fine, as an extra drive. However, upon double clicking to open it, it acts as an unknown file. It then furthermore asks what program you would like to open it with (explorer doesn't work).
The only way to extract the files, I have found, is to write a basic batch file and so copy over the files! (Going back to my Win 3.1 roots)
Obviously, I have scanned the drive with many virus scanners, but only on the computer that was previously infected; which I may add, my friend says is extremely slow and so obviously one deduces full of left over traces.
One obvious route would be to format the drive, but it seems to resist it in the way, you cannot actually format it using explorer or even command prompt. Furthermore, its appearance in device manager is scarce, but infrequently appearing. Albeit a yellow triangle.
I am planning to create a sterile format environment (partitioned, single basic operating system small unaccessable to system area) which I am experienced in creating and using for the study and furthermore, destruction of extremely resilient and dangerous programs that you could call viruses. It stops any system processes from moving within the partition and literally is going back to a pre-windows system.
However, I would like a take on the situation before I accidently put an extra space in a batch file (back to my roots) and therefore result in the destruction of my network...
Just a thought.
Note this is my first post (go me). I have looked at this forum regularly but never actually posted... strange eh?
Any help appreciated.
Cold, Sky Dark, Night
A friend of mine, like most people these days, has a flash pen drive. Storing 1Gb of memory it worked fine until the day her company decided to issue computers without any basic firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware and server protection software. (Windows XP Standard SP2 Laptop)
Needless to say within a few minutes on the web, they were swamped by viruses. The pen drive was used to transfer some word files and folders during the time of infection, unknowingly to the latter.
The computer was later cleansed, however the pen drive remains problematic.
Now, whenever you plug it into ANY computer, it appears in my computer, fine, as an extra drive. However, upon double clicking to open it, it acts as an unknown file. It then furthermore asks what program you would like to open it with (explorer doesn't work).
The only way to extract the files, I have found, is to write a basic batch file and so copy over the files! (Going back to my Win 3.1 roots)
Obviously, I have scanned the drive with many virus scanners, but only on the computer that was previously infected; which I may add, my friend says is extremely slow and so obviously one deduces full of left over traces.
One obvious route would be to format the drive, but it seems to resist it in the way, you cannot actually format it using explorer or even command prompt. Furthermore, its appearance in device manager is scarce, but infrequently appearing. Albeit a yellow triangle.
I am planning to create a sterile format environment (partitioned, single basic operating system small unaccessable to system area) which I am experienced in creating and using for the study and furthermore, destruction of extremely resilient and dangerous programs that you could call viruses. It stops any system processes from moving within the partition and literally is going back to a pre-windows system.
However, I would like a take on the situation before I accidently put an extra space in a batch file (back to my roots) and therefore result in the destruction of my network...
Just a thought.
Note this is my first post (go me). I have looked at this forum regularly but never actually posted... strange eh?
Any help appreciated.
Cold, Sky Dark, Night
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