I’ve encountered an unusual problem on a friend’s computer.

All of the.doc, pdf, and .jpeg files on this machine now have an additional extension of .encrypt. The extensions .tif and .gif are ok.

I’ve Googled this file extension and found nothing.

The owner of the computer doesn’t know what happened so I’m assuming it is a malware problem.

Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

The owner of the computer needed it back so I ran KillDisk to clean the Hard Drive and did a fresh install of XP.

I’m still stumped by the .encrypt file extension. In addition to here I’ve posted on several different malware prevention forums and have not received any replies. I’ve talked to three professional IT guys I know and they had not encountered this before. Although when I told one about not being able to access files he said: “It sounds like you’re using Vista.”

So I’ll keep hunting until I find what program encrypted these files in case this shows up again.

The only thing I found was some AutoIT scripts made to encrypt files, and use this file extension format:

http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=23071
http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=27279

Thanks Tripredacus,

The last link says that by changing the file name back to the original the file was restored to normal. On the files I had this did not work.

It is possible that this was an early version of something that got into my friends computer.

There is no chance that my friend was playing around with any kind of programming so I’m still thinking it came from malware.