You may infect other computers using your pendrive. You lost your files, and the system owner lost his system. Nobody wins.
1) Dont always assume that your pendrive is virus/ worm-free. anytime you plug it in other system, things can go into your device without you notice anything.
2) Dont rely too much on antivirus. what's the latest version? what is the best AV? The most expensive ensure the best protection? what function that it has; mail-scanner, internet security, firewall, real-time protection. what'd you do? scan every removables that plug in to your computer? guess what? your system may get infected? why?
well, do you know who is the culprit? or what it is? you. Yes, it's you.
most of the time, worms or trojans comes as an executable or sets of files. the ones with exe, bat, or cmd extension are executables. just as your normal documents, for examples Microsoft office's document has its name sample.doc. But, the default settings of your system may be preventing you from seeing extensions, unless you turn it on from folder options. Other than extensions, another thing to remember is worms are most of the time hidden, thus preventing you from seeing it in normal settings, unless once again you go to folder options and enable viewing of hidden files and/or superhidden files.
Worms itself is not dangerous. The user however makes it dangerous. Opening it, by double-clicking directly will allow it to run and infect the system you are in. but this most likely will not happen IF you know that the program is a worm. BUT as usual, you will never know. Sometimes, in an infected system, the program will hide your original file, and create a new file (the worm program, of course) and copy the name and looks of your original file that is hidden now. Can you understand the logic? when you go back to your PC, you will open the worm, (a self-killing move? yes, the worm now tricks you to run itself in your so called protected machine) there you go, one newly infected machine. what happened if your AV detected the worm? it will delete it for safety measure.
What you see instead is the AV seems to delete your file. actually it deleted the worm programs that looked like your file. what happended to your ori files? remained hidden, you havent lost it yet. after you enable hidden files viewing, go to each files properties and remove the hidden attribute.
However these are what happened when you have your pendrive infected. I’m here to share with you people out there, THE BEST WAY, is to not use double-clicking to open your removable drives in windows explorer. Use the address bar instead. or right click the drive and choose 'explore'. You may feel this is quite troublesome, but believe me, it's safer and worth it.
