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Geek Culture / Cleaning Virus from File

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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2009 12:54
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A friend of mine has had a virus embed itself in a file on his memory stick, the issue being that the infected file is part of his coursework and (rather foolishly) he has no backups of the file. For the time being, the virus is sitting dormant in this file, as obviously choosing to execute the file would potentially end in havoc. He has Avast installed on his computer, but is there any way to strip the virus out of the file without breaking it (the file)?

Cheers.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2009 13:00
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How's about you tell us what kind of file it is? This is like asking us how to replace the carburettor on your car without specifying what car it might be.

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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2009 13:06
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Apologies. It's an exe file built in Visual Studio. There is a "Repair" button in the Avast dialog, but upon reading about it, the method which it uses is to check the file against a clean version of the file which it collected into its database earlier. As no such database exists on this pc then it says it can't guarantee it will repair it correctly.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2009 13:07
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Without diving into the machine code, you can't do anything. Sorry. You're going to have to recompile from source if you have it.

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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2009 13:17
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Hmm too bad, I just hope he saved the source

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Jeku
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2009 18:12 Edited at: 3rd Oct 2009 18:13
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Why don't you copy the file somewhere else, and then try to repair the original? At least you have a backup of the virus'ed file to try other methods on later if you need to. I doubt simply copying the file will or can make it execute.


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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 3rd Oct 2009 18:24
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Hmm I tried that a minute ago and it failed to clean the file, so I guess it's a no go. Thanks anyways.

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Dextro
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Posted: 8th Oct 2009 18:48
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If the virus is not of the overwriting type (which nowadays it's very rare), it's very possible for it to be repaired by an antivirus. I say make a copy of the file just in case and let avast do it's job.
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