USB pen corrupt

[Sigo19]

Good Morning people,

 

Had a teacher come to me this morning with MORE pen drive problems, basically they have been working on files this weekend then they have came to open them this morning and the files now look like this:

 

 

From what I have read looks like a trojan has got a hold of it and ruined, I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem and been able to rescue anything from it?

 

Cheers

[Hulbert99]

Try scanning the drive with AV and anti malware programs first, I personally like Malwarebytes.

 

Then for data recovery I like EASEUS data recovery program (Limited to 1GB for the free version)

[elsiegee40]

And do it on a standalone machine... you don't want this on your network

[tigerstar]

Honestly that looks more like the results of a corrupted FAT than a trojan to me. It could be from the ill-timed removal of the drive while the FAT was being written (rare, but I've seen it happen), or the drive itself dying. You might be able to get some stuff back with Testdisk or your file recovery program of choice. I'd also suggest drilling the staff not to use USB drives as their sole storage medium - I've seen so many lose their only copy of their work to corrupted flash memory, snapped connectors and washing machines. They're great for storage and transport, but reliable they ain't.