found.000 is this a virus?

[compnovice]

Yesterday, I finally found my flash drive which is lost for almost a month. Inserted it to the computer to see if it's still working. Then suddenly the resident shield told me they found some threats(lgtp.pif and autorun.inf). I deleted them and the resident shield told me it's successfully removed. Then I safely eject the flash drive and inserted it back to the cpu. But the resident shield found the threats again which means they were not removed.

I also check the contents of my flashdrive and found this strange found.000 folder. I also found out that the folder found.000 has made its way to my local disk. In my local disk I also found a *$RECYCLE.BIN folder. The hidden folders in my local disk are not hidden anymore. Since I'm in a Details view, I can see the size of the files and I saw that all the folders became 272 kb. My local disk and flashdrive is now really crazy. Whenever I try to open a 'folder' in my flashdrive, the active window will close and open again already showing the contents of the 'folder'.

The flashdrive didn't have any malicious files since I lost it. I found my flashdrive inside a plastic bag and I was the one who originally placed the flashdrive there. I thought I lost it, but no, I just forgot where I placed it. How can these strange files go in my flashdrive? How do I make my local disk and flashdrive sane again? Please help me

Thanks

 

[marsmimar]

From what I could determine, a legitimate Found.000 folder is NOT a virus. A Found.000 folder is created when a CHKDSK scan or other disk verification or checking program/utility is run on your computer.

What is a Found.000 Folder? | The Malware Dictionary

However, malware often disguises itself by taking the name of a legitimate file or folder. For that reason it wouldn't hurt to run a couple more on-demand scanners to make sure your PC is clean. These products are free:

Windows Defender Offline

Malwarebytes

ESET Online Scanner

SuperAntispyware

HitmanPro

You'd also want to check the flash drive for malware. I suggest one of two ways to check. (1) With Malwarebytes installed, plug the flash drive into a USB port. Click Start > Computer > right-click the drive letter for the flash drive > scan with malwarebytes; or, (2) open Malwarebytes > full scan > select flash drive.

 

[jumanji]

After confirming that it is not a virus/malware what do you do with it?

A single .CHK file may contain

• an entire file/multiple entire files,
• a part/multiple parts of a file/multiple files
• a really messy mix of the above.

If you know what you are missing, you can rename the file extension ( For example if it is an excel file, rename it .xls) and check whether you can recover it. Most often, it is just less of a headache simply to delete them and forget what happened.