shamrin
Active Member
- Reaction score
- 48
- Location
- Lexington, Ky
This is a new customer to me who brought in a computer for virus removal. After cleaning it up, I went to do a final scan and saw that Avast had got hung-up on a folder for over an hour. It was just a temp folder located at C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5
Well after a bit of messing about and time-wasting, I found out that there were 3.5M files under that folder comprising about 70GB. Do you know how hard it is to delete 3.5M hidden system files? I ended up booting from an Ubuntu Live disc. The deletion routine has been running for about 24 hours now - still going strong. Just watching the files go by, it appears that about 70% of them are .js JavaScript files and the rest are .htm with a few .txt and .css files.
Anyway, my question is, how do you suppose these files got here? Avast was finding a lot of things it didn't like in these folders so I'm figuring them to be likely malignant. Maybe someone set up a virus-delivery system on the machine when it was part of a botnet? But over 3 million files?
Well after a bit of messing about and time-wasting, I found out that there were 3.5M files under that folder comprising about 70GB. Do you know how hard it is to delete 3.5M hidden system files? I ended up booting from an Ubuntu Live disc. The deletion routine has been running for about 24 hours now - still going strong. Just watching the files go by, it appears that about 70% of them are .js JavaScript files and the rest are .htm with a few .txt and .css files.
Anyway, my question is, how do you suppose these files got here? Avast was finding a lot of things it didn't like in these folders so I'm figuring them to be likely malignant. Maybe someone set up a virus-delivery system on the machine when it was part of a botnet? But over 3 million files?