Hi, when I click on my external usb drives (ive tried 3 different drives) i cannot access them. Ive been getting an error window with the the title kapEF.exe. First it told me I may not have permission, I scanned the drives with AVG & it found kapEF.exe infections so I removed them. However I still cant access them & now the window says Windows cannot find kapEF.exe. Make sure Ive typed the named correctly? Unfornately there are almost no results on google for kapEF.exe. 2 sites say it is a virus. I can however access the drives thru Disk Management? I have XP & I am the Administrator, cheers for any help.
Sounds like a virus that utilises the autorun.inf trick. In windows explorer, you should be able to right click and select open - that should show you your files.
Note that from the sounds of this (and a very limited look on google) - most likely all your writeable media that has been in contact with your computer will be affected / infected too ...
Well ... my solution is pretty drastic - reformat the drive on a clean machine. I just don't trust drives once infected, it's difficult to prove that the virus is completely gone ... See the thread here for a little more comments on this.
If the virus is truly braindead, then you may be able to get away with removing the autorun.inf + instances of the .exe file.
Also - you should create a normal user and only escalate your privileges as required...
It should be fine to backup the photos - turn on showing file extensions so that none are named "photo1.jpg.exe" for example.
Another way to be careful is to open the file within the application you use, rather than doubling clicking from the windows explorer. (You application should complain about a error reading the file if it's masquerading as an image file and it's really an execuatable).
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