Cyber crime is a popular business now-a-days. New variants of malware and phishing scams are spreading every moment at every corner of the cyber space. To achieve its goal malware uses several tricks. A common frustrating trick is that these hide files and folders by changing some settings in Windows registry. Such trick is used mainly by FakeHDD family of rogue anti-spyware programs by making it appear that the user has lost data on his hard drive and prompt you to purchase the program in order to resolve this issue. There are also cases where some worms (Stuxnet, varients of brontok, sohanad etc.) hide folders and create malicious shortcuts and/or executables that look alike that folders and thereby trick the user to execute those. Most common anti-malwares can detect and remove those malwares but commonly ‘forgot’ to unhide the files and folders. So, today I will give you tips to manually unhide non-system files and will also share tools to automate the process.

According to the developer,

• Small executable (390 Kb), digitally signed by Bleeping Computer, LLC.
• No installation, opens command prompt upon executing and starts processing. Can also be run from command prompt. This tool requires administrative rights.

• The process takes some time depending on your hard disk capacity, number of installed software, your processor speed, RAM etc.
• Creates report unhide.txt on desktop.
• Reboot your PC if it finds and repair any issues.
• Detailed instructions are available in the webpage.

Download
Download from the direct link
http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/grinler/unhide.exe

MD5: 4a70a9e1ce6cf4bcade6c9977985da95
SHA1: 68e1e223a25799546dc6c3d0690386aa3a9db27d

This tool is a part of Windows Repair that I reviewed few days back. According to the developer,

It checks the attributes of each file, and if it is hidden and not a system file it will unhide the file. This way normal hidden system files stay hidden, such as desktop.ini and such.

Features

• Small installer (452 Kb), not digitally signed.
• On executing the installer it installs the software in the same folder as the installer as “Tweaking.com – Unhide Non System Files”.
• The software does not create any registry entries and as such the created folder is portable. You can carry that in your thumb drive avoiding the need to install it in every required place.
• Once installed it executes repair.exe (present in that folder) automatically. In case you are using it later execute that executable to start the program.
• Starting the software in administrative mode is recommended.
• Click on start to start processing. Processing is very fast.

• Reboot your PC if it finds and repair any issues.

Download
Download the software from the following direct link
http://www.tweaking.com/files/setups/Tweaking.com-UnhideNonSystemFiles.exe

MD5: 319fd03d14d71fd898f86df0a5534f87
SHA1: 76577f51f4405df7ac662ccc330a4df004dcd426

• Start command prompt with administrative right.
• Move to the drive whose files you want to unhide.

1. If its the system drive: Type cd
2. If any other drive: Type drive letter: for example e: or h:

• Type attrib -h *.* /s /d
• It will process files in that drive and make changes if necessary.

• This command will unhide any non-system files it finds.
• Reboot your PC if it finds and repair any issues.

• It is always recommended to system restore point before proceeding with the fix..
• The process might take some time. You are not advised to stop any process forcibly because these may damage your system.
• Run all of them with administrative rights for proper fix.
• Even if the tool don’t ask for a reboot after a fix it is always recommended to reboot your PC if any issue have been fixed.
• Before running any of these tools make sure your PC isn’t infected anymore. Otherwise the malware will again hide those files and folders after a reboot. So, run a complete scan with your existing antimalware or secondary scanners like Comodo Rescue Disk, F-Secure Easy Clean, Norman Malware Cleaner, McAfee Stringer, Microsoft Safety Scanner etc.

Have a nice day. Stay SAFE !!

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