How To Unhide Hidden Files Caused By Malwares

How to unhide hidden files caused by malwares. This is the situation, I often face this problem, my thumb drive have been infected by malwares after going to a printing shop. When I open the USB drive, the things that I can see are virus files that pretend to be my actual folders and shortcut files that pretend to be my actual files stored in my drive. My actual files have gone missing.

Actually my files still available in the thumb drive. They are just set to be hidden.

If you also face this problem, follow the steps below to solve it.

To show those files, you have to edit some settings in Folder Option.

Go to Control Panel. In the Control Panel, by default, view setting is set to category mode, so change it to large icons or small icons. You can see this option at the top right of the control panel interface. Now you will see Folder Option, click on it.

Alternatively, open any folder, click on Organize, which you can find this at the top left just below the menu bar, then click on Folder and search options.

Select view tab. By default, hidden files and folders are not shown, set to show hidden files and folders. Another one and the most important part is to show protected operating system files. Untick “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” and just click okay on a warning box.

Click OK.

Now you can see the files inside.

But you cannot simply change their attributes. The normal way is to select all the files, right-click and choose “Properties.”

Normally, you can change the attributes from here, however, in this case the attributes are locked and we need to use command prompt to fix this.

To change the attributes, open command prompt. You can find command prompt by typing cmd in Start search box.

Now you have to know your USB drive letter, let say F:

Type below line on cmd and press Enter.

attrib -h -r -s /S /D f:*.*

where attrib is command line for attribute;
hyphen (-) is used to remove the applied attribute;
h is hidden attribute
r is read-only attribute;
s is system attribute;
/S is a command to process matched files in current folder and subfolders
/D is a command to process folders

Now you have revert the files attributes to original state. You can now change back the settings in folder option to their original state (don’t show hidden files and folders and don’t show protected operating system files.