UsbFix Scans and Cleans USB Malware

We have all seen those dreaded USB disks that come with one or other variations of the autorun virus. The moment you plug it into your computer, it starts to infect your hard disks and corrupts your documents. In fact, at one point in the past, I plainly refused to touch any of those USB pen drives. Some of my friends even became furious at my behavior and tried to force me into using their USB pen drives, but how could I risk infecting my important files? If you are also going through the panic mode because you suspect that one of your or your friends’ USB pen disks is infected with some sort of USB malware, then you can use the free UsbFix software to get rid of such malware.

UsbFix is a preventive measure against malware that specifically target USB disks. A common symptom of such infection is that your folders get hidden and are replaced by a virus program that has a folder icon, so that when you try to open a folder, you end up running the malware instead.

UsbFix is very straightforward to use – all you have to do is launch it and click on the Research button. There is a reason why the button is labeled “Research” and not “Search” – because the UsbFix does not depend only on the virus signatures but uses very smart detection methods that can even point out some of the newer malware as well.

UsbFix

The searching through all the different attached disk drives for malicious or suspicious files can take around one minute, depending on how many drives you have present in your Windows PC. During the scan, it displays number of infected files found on the disks being scanned. On my system it found one autorun.inf file and flagged it as infected.

UsbFix Scannig for Malware

After the scanning is complete, a log (UsbFix calls it “listing”) of the scan is displayed. The log contains basic information about your system as well as the details of any of the malware found on your computer. It detected an autorun.inf file on one of my USB pen drives. Although this file was not malicious in nature, it could be used to launch a malicious program.

UsbFix Listing

If it detects something on your computer or one of your USB pen disks, then you can click on the Clean button to clean the malicious items. During the cleaning, it closes all the open programs and windows, so you should  save any open documents before hitting the Clean button. The cleaning process looks similar to the “research” process and involves scanning of all the disk drives, removal of malicious files and vaccination of the disk drives against the autorun method of infection. You can also vaccinate the disk drives by clicking on the Vaccinate button in the main user interface.

UsbFix Options

In the options of the UsbFix, you can choose the listing code type (BBCode, HTML, CCM etc.), whether you want to disable the autorun feature in Windows, whether to display the listing (log file) after scanning or cleaning. You can also manage the files quarantines during the cleaning process from the options window.

Conclusion: UsbFix can help your detect and remove the USB oriented malware that targets USB disk drives and uses the autorun function in Windows to spread the infection. It can also vaccinate the disk drives against autorun based malware attacks.

You can download UsbFix tool from http://www.en.usbfix.net/.