How to Remove Shortcut Folder Virus from Storage Media without Antivirus

Shortcut virus and shortcut files are two entirely different concepts which are mostly misunderstood by the users. As a result the affected system becomes vulnerable to the infection. Shortcut virus is one lethal output of the malware combination; Trojan and Worm. The virus creates a replica of your folder/file or even external storage devices by hiding and replacing them. The replacement is made by creating a shortcut.exe of the same file.

Impact on Devices Infected With Shortcut Virus

The shortcut virus is created very cleverly so that neither can the user distinguish it as a virus nor the antivirus program itself. This leaves a user with no choice but to open such a file which leads to the execution of the virus causing it to duplicate and spread into the entire system.

WARNING: Spreading of this virus all over the system means that your machine and its activities will be vulnerable to monitoring and theft of crucial/confidential data from it.

How To Deal With Such Viruses?

As antivirus applications have failed at detecting such viruses, it is important for users to take precautionary steps themselves to ensure their data safety.

Here is a list of do’s and don’ts that must be adopted by everyone to ensure not being infected by the shortcut virus:

1. Never open your pen drive from the autorun window or even from My Computer
2. To open a pen drive: right click on it and select explorer or you can type the respective device drive letter to avoid the loading of any scripts.

Remove Shortcut Folder Virus From Storage Media Without Antivirus

NOTE: Antivirus program is not being used in this case as they are incapable of detecting such viruses.

1. Press Windows key + R simultaneously to open the Run window on your machine.
2. Type ‘cmd’ (without quotations) in the field provided. Click on Ok.
3. Now type in the drive letter for the storage media or partition that has turned into a shortcut folder and hit Enter.
4. The command prompt will display: E:\>
5. Add ‘attrib –s –h /s /d *.*’ after the drive letter (without quotes).

NOTE: Mind the spaces between each character.

1. This will remove shortcut virus from your drive and make its data accessible all over again.

THINGS TO REMEMBER

1. Follow the above mentioned steps exactly the way they have been instructed.
2. Do not immediately access the drive you just cleaned virus from. Reboot the machine and then proceed.
3. In case if you need to format your pen drive then do it without worrying because you can easily restore deleted data from pen drive