Huh??

I brought over my younger brother’s pen drive today to install some games and scanned the pen drive with my avast premium. Note : I never opened the game folders but some games were exe files. Avast found 3 viruses, trojan and malware. I selected “do nothing”, copied the games that avast didn’t highlight as infected and quickly went back to my brother’s house and told him his pen drive was infected. So, i did another scan on his computer with his avast free version and surprisingly, no viruses were found. I left him to do a full system scan anyway. Here’s what i wanna know :

  1. why his avast didn’t detect anything while mine showed 3 infections. is it because he is using the free version and I, the premium?

  2. Can you get infected simply by plugging in the usb or only when you expand the folders that are infected?

  3. Can I use the games that weren’t shown to be infected and delete the infected ones. Would the pen drive be safe/clean to use?

you guys are swell

First thing to do is install a dedicated USB malware detector/cleaner

Download MCShield to your desktop and install
It will initially run a scan and show the result as a toaster by the system clock
Then in the control centre select scanner and tick unhide items on flash drives

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/73555776/mcshield%20unhide.JPG

Plug in the drive and McShield will start a scan

Then get the log which will be located under the logs tab on the main page

And post that

  1. did you have same update? … what malware name was given?
  2. oh yes there is lots of malware that USB to spread, we see them here often

places to check suspicious files before you run them
www.virustotal.com / www.metascan-online.com / www.jotti.org

1]
No, most likely because of different vps version and/or different settings.

2]
Yes, simply plug in a external device can get your system infected.

3]
No. Some infections are not detected with a scan, but are on starting a application.

4]
Oh wait, there is no 4. It sounds like illegal copies of games. Never, ever use/trust them.