Virus encrypts photos and word files on SD card

Hello everyone!
I have such a trouble with the SD card, which rarely appears turned on in the PC & network. I upload my photos and videos there from time to time.

Some mysterious virus appeared there. I cannot neither identify it with anything nor neutralize it. I can’t even attach a folder or file with this virus to this letter.

It has a strange name ending and the file cannot even be archived. The behavior of the virus is as follows - it encrypts photos and word files. And it’s constantly increasing on the SD card. The day before yesterday there were about two hundred photos in some folder, yesterday there were 50 left. Today, no photos - only a mysterious 2GB file.

Moreover, the total number of photos was only 100MB. The photos still remained in the other folders, but much less than there were at first.
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Avast does not detect malware. I scanned the card using NPE, MB, HijackThis, esetonlinescanner. There is no result - ‘everything is fine’ with a verified card. But the virus did not jump to the PC’s hard drive, thank God.

Anyone who can advise on how to neutralize the virus and whether it’s possible to restore photos and documents - I’ll be very grateful.

Why are you still using it if you believe it is infected?

My feeling is that this is more likely to be a hardware malfunction issue rather than a virus. You’re not going to be able to fix it either way so it really doesn’t make much difference to the solution I am suggesting.

I hope you have backups of the stuff you’ve copied to it.

What I’d do is simply ditch the SD card. Smash it to bits with a hammer before throwing it in a bin so nobody can possibly retrieve anything from it.

Problem sorted.

I’d then run a full AV scan on my whole system just to be as certain as you can be that, if it is malware, it has not propagated itself somewhere else.

If it’s a virus, it passes the antivirus when the system boots, before it loads everything. You have a tool called Recuva portable that is used to recover deleted files.

Thanks for the suggestions and assumptions. I still can’t tell if it’s a virus. All the same, I’m more inclined to the fact that this is some kind of software error on the SD card. Because antiviruses can’t detect it. Even the boot-load from the antivirus program doesn’t note anything. On the other hand, programs like Recuva and similar programs can’t recover lost content from SD card. These programs offer to restore only those files that I previously deleted myself from the card, not encrypted ones as a result of this error.

This looks like broken filesystem for me…

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