COVID 19 Enhanced Community Quarantine

We have just finished a week under a community quarantine. Most weeks seem to breeze by so fast. But this particular week seemed to last like an eternity. Our family has been glued to every information source - the radio, television, and the internet - just to learn as much as possible about the virus and how the government is addressing the situation.

I can't help but wonder about the following:

• How long can the rest of the world remain in a state of quarantine? I understand that the quarantine is supposed to slow down the spread of the virus. But if people cannot work and buy food, then they might die of starvation instead. A government can only supply food as long as their are stocks. Worse, being in a state of quarantine could lead to civil unrest which could lead to riots, increased crime rates, and anarchy.
• There has been so much emphasis on testing if one has been infected by the virus. But chances are, at some point, everyone would have already been infected because the virus continues to spread even if countries have implemented lock downs. Will countries reach a point where they will have to kill their own citizens to prevent the spread of the disease? I have probably been watching too many apocalyptic world scenarios where only doomsday preppers survive. Instead of mass testing, perhaps the government should focus on finding a cure. And while that is taking time, they should try to increase the immunity of the people and the capacity of health services to take care of their patients. What use is finding out that you have the virus when hospitals are full and will only end up turning you away. It seems like biotech companies are only seeing these test kits as a money making opportunity. Perhaps the owners of these biotech companies should be exposed to the virus so that they realize how useless it is to have all the money they can amass when their health is affected.
• Is this the global problem that the antichrist will solve? This virus problem will probably affect the global economy. Being under quarantine has given government authorities a reason to prevent anyone from buying and selling. Only individuals with a pass issued by the government will be allowed to purchase. And authorities are pushing for electronic means of payment since the virus can supposedly be passed on through objects like paper money and coins. So, this virus or similar events in the future might force everyone to comply with a global system of payment and tracking individuals. Refuse to receive their mark or pass will mean starvation.

There is always hope in Jesus. That is what I choose to believe even when the situation seems grim. As Christians, if we die because of this virus, we know that we have a place in heaven. God may be using this virus as a wake up call for people to busy with this earthly life. God may be reminding each and everyone of us that there is more to life than amassing wealth, popularity, or power. We have to give an account for how we lived our life on the day of judgement. Did we use our lives for God's glory? Did we lead others to Jesus? Or did we only live for our own selfish pursuits? I hope that if you are reading this, you would surrender your life to Jesus for He is the only one who can give us hope and peace in troubled times. And even if you die because of this virus, you are assured that Jesus has prepared a place for you to live with Him in eternity. That knowledge helps us continue living on because our lives are in His hands.

Triada Virus

My Android phone got hit with the Triada Virus. Updating Kaspersky Antivirus does not work. The virus has protected itself from detection. Malwarebytes does not work. It detects the item, but cannot remove it. Had to resort to a factory reset and will have to reinstall apps one by one. Mental note, always start with your antivirus when installing apps on a new phone.

Generic.lhk Hides USB Files

AVG Antivirus detected the Generic.lhk worm when I scanned my friend's USB files. There was only one file shown in windows explorer, and it was a shortcut with a size of a few kilobytes. But when I right-click on the drive, the pie shows that about 20% of the drive space was still being taken up by files. The files were still there. There was hope of recovering them. So I let AVG remove the threat and then I moved on to the next step.

I usually use the DOS command, attrib -r -a -s -h to be able to see the missing files. Sadly, virus and malware makers-methods are getting more and more sophisticated and this approach no longer seemed to work in this particular case.

After doing a search on Google, some sites recommend using WinRAR to recover the files. But WinRAR is not completely free. So I opted using 7-zip instead, which was completely free at the time I downloaded it. I opened the program, then looked for the USB drive with the problem. There were only 3 files initially, the shortcut, and two additional files which showed up after running the attrib command. After checking these three files, 7-zip found the files in the shortcut. I extracted these files to my hard drive, formatted the USB, then copied the files back to the USB. I also rerun the AVG scan on the USB drive, just to be on the safe side.

Virus and malware makers will continue making our lives more and more difficult. Time spent fixing the problem could have been spent on something more worthwhile. I just hope I can keep up with finding solutions to more sophisticated attacks.

Recycler Virus

My friend's USB drive got infected with the Recycler Virus despite being vaccinated with PANDA security software. This virus has hidden all folders in the USB drive in a subfolder named "_" (underscore, without the quotes). It also creates a bunch of "~" (tilde) or "~$" (tilde-dollar) prefixed files with sizes between 1 kB and 10 kB. The USB drive was also made almost full, with only a few MB of free space remaining. And upon scanning the drive with AVG Anti-virus, there were about 2000 plus threats found.

The first thing we should do is to show all hidden files and folders in the drive. If you're using Windows 7, then this guide by Lawrence Abrams should be helpful.

Once you can see the hidden files and folders, you can follow these steps:

• Scan, using AVG, the files you want to recover, (making sure these are threat free) and transfer these files to your hard-drive. Make sure you check the "_" folder and its subfolders for any of your files which the virus might have hidden.
• Format the USB drive
• Transfer the files you've recovered back to the USB drive.

The above steps are simple compared to manually deleting all unwanted files, since you're not sure you've deleted every infected file. But here's a list of unwanted files I've seen this virus create

• RECYCLER.exe
• "_" folder
• RECYCLER subfolder within the "_" folder
• a lot of .chk files

So another option is to delete these unwanted files and folders (again, make sure you transfer your files out of the "_" folder before deleting it, and make sure the files you are transferring are uninfected by checking them with AVG).

I hope this guide has helped you recover from a Recycler viral infection. Feel free to share your comments and thoughts on how to improve this guide. Thanks.