02 Apr 10 How to remove autorun.inf virus and Search Engines

plus2x2 How to remove autorun.inf virus and Search Engines

This post is probably not suitable for my blog but I was hoping people will find this useful when they have a similar problem with me. I actually wanted to say that I am very pleased with Yahoo! Answers with this issue.

Needless to say, my computer was infected with autorun.inf which will auto run their affiliate file name called affi8l.exe. Fortunately, my anti-virus program could find out easily the exe file and remove it right away though I cannot remove autorun.inf and that file has been annoying for a few hours. So, I finally do web search and after 6-7 search engine results, I must admit it was pretty much disappointing as I could not find the correct solution. I was about to feel Google is no longer dependable on search results. And at the eighth link, I finally found the solution on Yahoo! Answers, and that answer was in fact easier to find in Yahoo! search engine. My point is, Yahoo! sometimes provides better search results and relevancy despite Google has been the number 1 search engines for ages.

So, I will directly quote from Yahoo! Answers referenced to here. Thanks to the original person who answered this perfectly.

You can boot up your PC in safe mode command prompt.

unhide the autorun.inf
c:\attrib -r -s -h autorun.inf

rename it the autorun.inf to txt
c:\ren autorun.inf to autorun.txt

create a FOLDER call autorun.inf to prevent re-infection
c:\mkdir autorun.inf

find out the virus file name
c:\type autorun.txt

It may show something like this

[AutoRun]
open=virusname.exe
shellexecute=virusname.exe
shell\Auto\command=virusname.exe

unhide the virus
c:\attrib -r -s -h virusname.exe

remove the virus
c:\del virusname.exe

del the autorun.txt
c:\del autorun.txt

Keep the autorun.inf folder to prevent future infection

Below is quoted from the website “Virus Removal Guru”

Affi8l.exe is a dangerous file which creates activities on a user’s computer which may be highly undesirable. This file is totally unsafe.

Type: Trojan Virus (Click Here To Learn More)
Location: C:\Affi8l.exe (Click Here To Learn How To Locate)
Risk Level: Moderate (Learn More About Risk Levels)

Affi8l.exe has been identified as a computer virus. The file is generally bundled with another trojan virus, herss.exe, and additional files which include cvasds0.dll, cvasds1.dll, and cvasds2.dll.

As a conclusion, nowadays, search engine world is pretty much monopolized and we don’t seem to bother about it. And this is probably one of the very few times I gave credits to Yahoo! Search in past 9 years.