Shortcut Virus And How To Remove It From Your PC—Viruses can be tricky, but the shortcut virus is one of the trickiest on the internet. The shortcut virus hides your files and folders and replaces them all with shortcuts that look the same. The shortcut virus can infect your device and then trick you into downloading dangerous software.
The virus is a Trojan and worm combination that hides all of your files and folders and then reinstates them with a shortcut that looks similar to the originals. When you eventually launch one of these false shortcuts, you end up running malware that reproduces the virus and further infects your system.
How To Remove A Shortcut Virus From Your PC
If your PC is infected with the shortcut virus, then any time you plug in another external device, the infection will flood to that device
Here is how to eradicate shortcut viruses using CMD (On a Windows machine):
- Open the task manager (ctrl + shift + Esc keyboard shortcut)
- In the process tab, right-click on the wscript. Exe or script.VBS, right-click on it, and select End
- Close the task manager
- Open the start menu, search for re-edit, and launch the registry editor.
- In the registry editor, navigate to the following in the left bar:
- Look for any strange-looking key names, such as odwcamszas, WXCKYz, OUzzckky, in the right pane. For each one, run a Google search to see if it’s related to shortcut viruses.
- Right-click on them and select Delete. Do this at your own risk(Always make sure you know what a key does before tampering with it)
- Close the Registry Editor.
- Type msconfig, then click OK to open the System Configuration window. On the run prompt(Windows key + R keyboard shortcut)
- Look for any strange-looking .EXE or .VBS programs, select each one, and click Disable. In the Startup tab
- Close the System Configuration window.
- Type %TEMP%, then click OK to open the Windows Temp folder. Delete everything inside. When open the run prompt
- , navigate to the following folder in File Explorer
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
14. Looking .EXE or .VBS files and delete them.
A shortcut virus is a particularly nasty strain of malware, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to detect or fix. Now you know how it works and what to do when you’re infected by one.