USB Shortcut Recover

The “Shortcut virus” is one of the most infamous malicious threats of the last years. It is best known for the way it works: both in plain sight and yet quite hard to counter.

It replicates your files and folders and replaces them with infected shortcuts (shortcuts.exe) which will spread the infection when they’re executed, allowing additional malware to be installed and to threaten your system and your data.

This virus comes with two main variants: a Trojan that creates infected shortcuts of your Flash drives after it hides their contents, and a more dangerous and annoying one that replaces the files and folders on your system with infected shortcuts. Since it’s such a perilous and widely-spread virus, many specialized tools have been developed with the sole purpose of dealing with it and solving the issues it causes. The USB Shortcut Recover is just one of these tools.

USB Shortcut Recover is a small and very simple application created to recover data from the USB sticks or hard disks that got corrupted and infected by a Shortcut virus. Though it’s a very neat and lightweight freeware, the program is capable of recovering and restoring the affected files and folders back to their original locations. In other words, this handy little tool can put files exactly where they were before being infected with the infamous Shortcut viruses.

Another really nice thing about this tiny freeware is the fact that it works not only with USB sticks and pen drives as its name might make you think, but also with SD Cards and hard drives.

There’s not much else to say about this tool, as it’s very simple, small, and developed with one single purpose: to scan your system after Shortcut virus infections and recover the affected files. Since it’s free and so convenient to use, I’d say it’s worth a try anytime you have to deal with trouble dealt by the Shortcut virus.