In this article, we will go through the solution to completely remove pendrive shortcut virus from our USB drive and our Windows computer.
Symptoms and behavior of Pendrive shortcut virus
Lately I have been asked about the pen drive shortcut virus by quite a few people including users of iTechtics through the comments on other articles. The symptom of this virus is that all the folders you copy to your USB drive will be converted to shortcuts. If you double click the shortcut, it will open the same folder in a new window. At first I didn’t take it serious until I came across an infected system myself. If you go to Google Search and search for a solution to pen drive shortcut virus, you will be greeted with a lot of pages with almost the same sort of solution. A batch file is being shared across all the pages that I came across. The batch file simply does three things; unhide all the files in the USB drive, delete all the shortcuts in the USB drive and delete two files called fypuas.exe and fypuasx.exe. While this is a solution, it is not a permanent solution as it will only last until the computer is restarted. If you restart your computer and insert your USB drive again, it will show the same behavior as discussed above.
Fixing Pendrive shortcut virus issue permanently
Before going through the steps to delete this virus from your system, let me give you a brief overview of what this virus does. This will make it easier for us to understand and solve the problem. This virus surfaced in 2010 and has been around with different names since then. It injects itself to system startup, creates a few executable files inside the USB drive which look like shortcuts, hides the original folders and files inside the USB drive, copies itself into the profile folder of the current user and connects to an outside computer. If you right click any shortcut folder inside your USB drive and go to Properties, you will be able to confirm that this is actually not a shortcut but properties of an executable file. Now let’s go through removing the shortcut virus step by step: Hopefully the above steps will cleanup our system from the pendrive shortcut virus. Now let’s clean our USB drives and restore our data. Following these steps should remove the virus from the USB drive completely. If you open your USB drive folder from Windows Explorer, you will be able to see all your files and folders restored inside the USB drive. After removing this virus, you should scan your system with a good antivirus so that it may be able to detect and remove traces of any virus inside your computer. You will be able to download AVG Internet Security 2014. If you are still having problems with this malware even after going through all these steps, please let me know through comments and we can find a solution to your specific problem together. Also see:
Remove Virus From USB Flash Drive Using Command Prompt (CMD)How To Show Hidden And Protected Files And Folders In Windows 11/10How to Fix Memory Leaks in WindowsHow To Delete, Move, or Rename Files In Use By Another ProgramHow To Fix File Explorer “Not Responding” In Windows
