Good evening. I have some .exe files in my external hard drive and yesterday I connected it to a PC with Windows 8.1 and I noticed that each .exe file got hidden. I had to uncheck the OS hide files option to see them again. Now, the name of each file has a "g" letter in the beginning of the file's name. So my question is: why happened that and how can I fix it? Thanks for reading my problem. Every answer will be really appreciate.
please give at least one example, to understand You better Is it something like this giexplore.exe if the normal is iexplore.exe or is something else?
As I said, still nobody have not said, what it is. The same case have been happened already from XP times, as I said, I haven't still found what it is. Haven't seen, but if You search with Google, You can find something, but as much as I know, usually nobody haven't found. Maybe somebody else knows, but I don't. It's likely to be some kind of malware anywhere what renames these files and deletes the content. You can try to open some of them with Notepad and compare, maybe that all files are the same, only name is different.
Sounds like a clumsy attempt of very early ransomware... Renaming the files = They cannot be run by their original names, anymore. Hide the files = Casual user doesn't see the files in Explorer anymore and thinks they are gone. Result: Some would pay the ransom. Admittedly, I have never heard of it before.