Not every attack announces itself with a ransom note. Malware hides files, corrupts what it touches, and sometimes the cleanup does the real damage — antivirus quarantines swallowing documents, panicked resets wiping drives, ‘fixes’ that fixed the data away. This service recovers what the infection and its aftermath left behind.
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Beyond encryption (which has its own page), infections hurt files four ways. Hiding: whole folders flipped to hidden-and-system — the USB-stick classic where everything ‘vanishes’ but nothing left. Corruption: injectors and wipers damaging what they touched, from Office macros to boot structures. Deletion: destructive strains, or the malware clearing tracks. And collateral: the biggest category — quarantine folders holding your files hostage, system restores rolling back your documents, factory resets applied in fright. Rule for right now: once you suspect infection and data matters, stop cleaning and start preserving — image first, disinfect after. Cleanup on the only copy is where recoverable becomes gone.
Infected media is handled as infected: imaged on isolated bench systems, never booted, with the recovery working on copies while the original stays quarantined. Recovered files are checked before return — you get your documents back, not the passenger that came with them — and we’ll flag what the infection actually was when it’s identifiable, which often answers the ‘how did this happen’ question. If the machine still runs and you’re mid-panic: power it off at the button, nothing more. Everything after that point goes better on the bench.
Usually yes: quarantine is containment, not destruction — files are moved and encoded, not erased. Recovery extracts them, verifies they're your documents rather than droppers, and returns them clean. Bring the machine or drive before any 'purge quarantine' housekeeping runs.
Textbook: a worm has flipped your folders to hidden and often left shortcut decoys in their place. The data's there. Recovery unhides and cleans it properly — resist the urge to click the shortcuts, which is how the worm boards your machine too.
Depends what the reset did: many 'remove everything' resets are quick-format-plus-reinstall, leaving the old data partially recoverable beneath. Stop using the machine immediately — every update it downloads lands on your documents — and let the diagnostic map what survived.