I have a thumbdrive which I use to plug in at print shops to get my printing done. The first time it got infected by a Windows malware "Gamarue", I copied out files using Ubuntu and formatted it, no harm done. I head on down to an entirely different print shop, and it gets infected again with the same malware. :(
Anyway, interesting question the malware hides your content in a "nameless" folder and to the unsuspecting user baits you into double clicking a .lnk
file which, I assume, allows the malware to copy onto your computer. I couldn't see this nameless folder while in Windows.
While using the file viewer in Ubuntu, I can see that there is a folder there with no name containing all my files. Now just for kicks, I decided to access this folder via terminal. All I need to do is to cd
into /media
, view the folder and copy out the folders if I desire right? Well nope...
$ ls -l
total 20
drwx------ 1 seelan seelan 4096 Sep 27 10:11 System Volume Information
-rw------- 2 seelan seelan 817 Sep 27 10:11 Theia (30GB).lnk
drwx------ 1 seelan seelan 12288 Sep 27 10:11
Tadaaaa a nameless folder/directory that I cannot access via terminal. How would I go about accessing this folder? Any ideas?
Edit: a little more research into it shows that the non-printing character is octal character 302 240. this was done by "ls -l | od -c" showing the octal character occupying the space. link states that "The character-pair \302\240 is the "NO-BREAK SPACE" from UTF-8 encoding.". Only issue now is you cannot rename files via terminal and you can't enter octal characters when copying the file or can you?
Answer Edit: Considering it was a non-printing character, i looked for a way to change the encoding of the terminal, hopefully i could find a way to view the name of the folder. For some reason while attempting the various tutorials, i tried to cd into the folder using a variable substitution.
cd $'\302\240'
Further looking things up on this webpage. i found out that this will expand single/multi escape octal characters into its relevant ascii/unicode character. Using the same concept you can make and remove the directory if you'd like.
cd " "
.-b
,-N
,-q
or-Q
flags ofls
. Maybe they show some normally invisible characters.cd ./\ /
might work too.