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How to manually detect malicious items on UBS drive?


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#1
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I don't have any symptoms of infections. Just would like to know for my personal knowledge.

If I want to manually detect viruses, malware, etc. on a USB drive or other external storage device, is it as easy as selecting to "Show hidden files & folders" & to un-tick "Hide protected Operating system files" in Windows. Then just browse the device looking for suspicious files you know you haven't saved yourself? Or is it something more difficult than that?

Thanks
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#2
Neil Jones

Neil Jones

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You can browse the disk yourself if you know what you're looking for.
Just because you haven't saved a file yourself doesn't mean it's malicious. When you edit Word documents for example Word will create autosave files in the location of the file you're editing. If Word then falls over for whatever reason, the files aren't removed and could be used for Autorecover later.

No, a better solution would be an actual scanner. Filenames don't tell anybody anything, you can name any file you want to any name you want. That isn't evidence enough of an infection and if you were to purge files on a hard drive under this methodology you'd wipe out half of the operating system.
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