How to Remove Shortcut Virus from USB Drives and PC – Guide

Viruses can be insidious, but the dreaded Shortcut virus is perhaps one of the most insidious on the web. It can infect your device and then trick you to download more malicious software. A shortcut virus is a type of Trojan/worm combination that hides all your files and folders and replaces them with shortcuts that look identical to the originals. When you start one of these fake shortcuts, you end up up run malware that duplicates the virus and further infects your system resulting in stolen personal information, degraded system performance and all sorts of other malware related side effects. Shortcut viruses primarily affect physical file transfer devices such as USB flash drives, external hard drives, and SD memory cards, but can spread to computers if exposed to an infected device that uses autorun or autorun on the Windows. Many shortcut viruses are not detected by antivirus software, so running a security suite with a virus scanner is usually not enough. Fortunately, the manual Shortcut virus removal process is relatively easy and painless. USB shortcut virus is a type of malware that infects your USB drive in a way that prevents access to your files. This trojan hides all your files and replaces them with the shortcuts of the same name.

How to Remove Shortcut Virus from USB Drive/Pendrive Using CMD

If your USB drive doesn’t have important files, you can try to format it, but if it contains important files, you won’t format it. To remove shortcut virus manually, follow these steps.

How to Remove Shortcut Malware Permanently from PC Hard Drive

After recovering the files on a USB drive, you can use them, but if you re-plug the USB flash drive to the infected computer, your flash drive will re-infect. So, it is better to remove the source of this virus which is an infected computer. Follow the steps below to manually remove shortcut virus from PC. This works for all Windows versions like Windows 7, 8/8.1 and Windows 10. Here, look for Registry Keys “WXCKYz“, ”ZGFYszaas” “OUzzckky” “odwcamszas“. If you find any of them, right-click and delete that registry key. If you can’t find the exact registry key, look for similar registry keys and google them to find out what they do. This will remove Shortcut Virus from your computer, if not then try these steps.

Final note

I hope you like the guide How to Remove Shortcut Virus from USB Drives and PC. In case if you have any query regards this article you may ask us. Also, please share your love by sharing this article with your friends.