I’ve been dealing with a persistant virus since last Thursday/Friday, and finally had to restore a system image from a few months ago. I believe the virus was eradicated from my laptop (quick scans don’t show anything anymore) by that, but I’m going to let two different antivirus programs as well as Malwarebytes Antimalware and maybe some other antimalware program do full scans of my my laptop and two external hard drives that were plugged when the virus happened before I use FTP or upload any files from my system to my sites. The two external hard drives are really big, so it’ll take several hours (at the very least, 11 hours) to complete one full antivirus/antimalware scan of my system.So it’ll be propably be another couple of days before I do any updates on any sites.

More about the virus: I’m actually unsure whether I had one or two viruses. But whatever, the difficult one was the one called ShortCut virus.What is does is infect USB drives: it hides the folders, creates shortcuts to them but those shortcuts actually lead to the apparently random-named EXE in a new folder called RECYCLER. Luckily I guess, the moment I saw the folders faded and all the shortcuts that shouldn’t be there plus one folder I had not created, so I never did click on any of the shortcuts or anything. Instead I knew I must’ve been hit by a virus and went googling.

No matter what antivirus or antimalware programs I tried to use to remove it, it always was right back after required restart although all the programs had claimed it had been successfully removed, both in Windows Safe Mode and normal mode. It must have resided in the memory or something and the programs didn’t detect all of it properly. In the end, yesterday, I decided to restore the system image I made in June and that seems to have worked because now I could clean up the two USB drives without problems. But like I said, I’m going to let a number of programs make full scans of my system and hard drives  just to be sure.