Calvin’s Hub

Lately here in our office we’re experiencing a lot of worm problems. The PC kind of worm that infects networked PC’s, USB thumb drives, External Hard disks, etc.

Here’s a quick guide on how to check if your PC or external drive is infected:

1. Click Start > Run
2. Type cmd and press Enter (to run command prompt)
3. Type cd\ and press Enter (to go to the root folder of the drive. If you want to check your external disk, type it’s drive letter instead, e.g “F:”)
4. Type attrib -h -r -s *.inf (to unhide any .inf files)
5. Type type autorun.inf (to view contents of the autorun.inf if present)

If you get a “File not found” message then your PC is most likely clean. If you were able to view the contents of an autorun.inf file, then congratulations you’ve found a worm and might be spreading it to other people via thumb drives or external hard disks.

Autorun.inf should only be present on CD’s, not file drives. It is good practice not to double click a drive to open it to avoid triggering autorun.inf. Use right click > Open instead.

There are many variations of worms but here are some commonalities among them:

• File extensions are usually .VBS, .EXE, .DLL or .COM
  
• They need autorun.inf to run
• They usually reside on the root folder of your drives (C:\, D:\, etc)
• They are always hidden and masked as a system file
• Sometimes they prevent you from accessing the Task Manager and killing the process
• Sometimes you can’t successfully apply Show hidden and system files from the folder option

Hope you have a clean one. It’s a pain to remove them and verify that your system’s clean. If you’re not good with computers then find someone to remove it for you.

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Filed under: Tips n' Trix