The article talks about how to check a USB flash drive for viruses, how dangerous it is to infect removable storage devices, and how to cure an infection.
Digital age
Every year the availability of digital technologies is growing, and for a long time you will not surprise anyone with a powerful computer, tablet or smartphone with Internet access. Such technologies have firmly entered our world, and many can no longer imagine life without them. And the matter is not only in entertainment, they significantly simplify any work, communication between people and other processes. But over time, a whole bunch of attackers appeared who use digital technology for various crimes, thefts and personal gain, they are called hackers, and their weapons are computer viruses.
It began long before the ubiquity of computers and the Internet. The very first viruses were kind of jokes and practical jokes, they did not pursue malicious intentions, but over time, everything changed. Especially when computers began to be used by various financial organizations, and people used credit cards and other electronic currencies.
Antiviruses have been developed to protect against them, but malware can bypass them, and very often unsuspecting people participate in their distribution, for example, using an already infected flash drive. So how to check a flash drive for viruses and clean it from them? This we will understand.
Distribution methods
First, let's talk a bit about why viruses attack flash drives and why this is dangerous.
Any virus, both biological and computer, needs to somehow spread itself. In the case of digital technology, the Internet and vulnerabilities in operating systems and antiviruses are needed. And at some point, hackers came up with an interesting and original solution in their own way: viruses began to copy themselves onto circuit carriers.
In practice, it looks something like this: when a computer is infected, the virus does not give itself away for some time, and when a removable device is connected to the computer, whether it is a flash drive, floppy disk or hard drive, the virus is copied to it and infects it when it is connected to another computer already him. Such malware may for a very long time not pretend to be activated by the creator’s command immediately on hundreds of PCs. And if this happened, then how to check the flash drive for viruses?
Check
First you need to decide on the antivirus program. All of them perform the same task, but some differ in functionality, for example, they do not have an intelligent module that recognizes a threat that is not yet in the official databases. So, if you need a guarantee, it is better to use several anti-virus utilities at once , since they are free and you can find them on the official sites of full versions of the software.
In the case of a conventional antivirus, you need to open "My Computer", right-click on the flash drive icon and select the antivirus scan item.
If temporary utilities are used, then before starting them you must specify the verification zone, in particular, a USB flash drive. So now we know how to check a flash drive for viruses.
The duration of this process greatly depends on the power of the computer, the specific security software, the "clogged" flash drive, and a number of others. By the way, most modern antiviruses can scan all removable media automatically immediately after they are connected, or you can configure this parameter manually. So now we know how to clean the flash drive of viruses.
Mistakes
By the way, flash drives, like all storage media, are sometimes subject to the influence of file system errors. This happens mainly due to interruption in reading or writing information, power outages and other things. In any case, if the flash drive did not immediately fail, but the system reports errors, you can try to fix them. So how to check the flash drive for errors? In Windows, the system itself will offer to run a check if there are errors. But you can do this manually. You need to select the USB flash drive in "My Computer", right-click, then the "Properties", "Tools" and "Check the disk for errors" item.
But sometimes it happens that standard OS tools cannot do this, then a specialized program comes to the rescue. You can check the flash drive with third-party software, for example, Flash Memory Toolkit. This is free software, which can be found on the official website. If it is possible to correct errors, the program will do everything automatically and you can use the storage device again.
Conclusion
So we figured out how to clean the flash drive of viruses and check it for file system errors. It is advisable to carry out these actions regularly, as they will protect against computer infection and the loss of important data. But there is no ideal protection; moreover, viruses are constantly modified by their authors.