Effects of a virus infection?

A friend of mine had a virus infection that her nephew dealt with by re-installing Windows. The infection was present for a week or so, and her Documents were being backed up during that time to an external hard drive. We are about to restore those documents and pictures to the computer. I am wondering if we need to be concerned about infected files in her documents or pictures. Norton has scanned them and said they are clean, but I've generally read that an anti virus scan is never guaranteed to catch 100% all malware.

So my question is, does it happen that malware can go into the Documents folder and infect Office docs or pictures, such that I should run a few more scans with other anti malware software to be safe before I copy these files back to the computer?

Thanks

 

yes. scan some more

 

Traditionally data was safe from being infected, but with todays data formats there is executable code that can run in your data files, which makes them susceptible. i.e. scripting.

Along with executable code in data, there is also the issue of whether or not these are files you created, in your My Documents directory or files created by unknown other people. For example, a power-point presentation you created, or one you downloaded off the Internet.

 

Yes, so some scans with malwarebytes and superantispyware to ensure that most of the malware has been detected and removed would be most appropriate.

 

Try scanning with Hitman Pro. Multi-engines detect more than a single one. It can't scan subdirectories and has an 25 mb compressed upload limit though.

If you can't scan with those limitations, use AVERT or BugBopper. BugBopper can't remove malware, but I believe you can do that manually very easily (unless you opened those files). Also new file take a while to be examined by their labs.

If those documents are private, then you should only consider AVERT, because it doesn't upload them elsewhere for scanning.

 

OK thanks for the help. I will run some more scans on the files.