Document Watchdog

Description (of the application):

One of my friends faced malware attack on his computer. These malware/spam-ware/virus (whatever name you give) are notorious in making your life hell for their monetary benefit. Some show dangerous message, creating fear in you, some delete your critical files and there are some who just encrypt all your files to no-readable by any method.

We all know how important are our documents (Word DOCX and Excel XLSX files) are to us. Many documents contain information for our livelihood. All documents of my friend's computer were encrypted and the malware showed message to transfer huge money in bitcoins to a given link.

No matter how much money you send they will never give your original documents back. Because they have destroyed the original documents. See all encryption has decryption logic. And there are people with higher knowledge of encryption/decryption with more powerful machines and they will be able to decrypt the documents. So, the malware does not encrypt the documents in true sense by corrupt the files to no decryptable form. Yes, that is true. My friend took help of many experts but they could not decrypt any of the documents.

Now we do not know when the malware is going to harm us. The only solution is prevention of the attack. There is no alternative to periodic backup, but we must ensure that correct files are backed.

If we can check and find that our documents (Word DOCX and Excel XLSX files) are non-readable then we can be alert and take preventive steps. Now we have so many documents in different folders so it is big job to open and check each of them. 

I created Document Watchdog to do the job for us.

Installation and uninstallation (on computer):

To install, extract the zip file in a folder, say "Document Watchdog", and run the "Document Watchdog" exe.

To uninstall, right click on tray icon of "Document Watchdog" and select 'Exit'. Then delete all files in the folder and delete the folder.

Auto-start with windows:

To make this program auto start with Windows, please check below link for the steps to add shortcut of a program into the start-up folder in more details, each accompanying with visual image.

https://sites.google.com/site/aghappy/Home/shortcutinstartup

Anti-Virus reports malware (what to do?):

Delete the exe and it's folder. There is nothing we can do as this is false alert and we do not have resource to request all Anti-Virus companies to update their database. Similar problem is faced by small developers worldwide, check below links,

http://blog.nirsoft.net/2009/05/17/antivirus-companies-cause-a-big-headache-to-small-developers/

Below is VirusTotal scan result, where most mark the exe as clean

Document_Watchdog.exe: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/753e5eec687df587d69dd51566728aa902a9738160d8bc58e91068e572fe757e/detection

Document_Watchdog.dll: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/22546b7d1bed54c3bafa5fdbe0e0a302c185f823630605f097d3d77c77187f88