Accidental deletion - anything I can do?

[FHC]

Hi,

Avast caught a virus (thank you Avast). Being an idiot I then deleted it (as in I right clicked on it from the "view Scan results" page and clicked "delete") I did this because I wasn't thinking clearly and thought "belt and braces, better get it as destroyed as it possibly can be".

I've now got an IT expert who wants to study the virus and find out more about it (there's reason to suspect this wasn't a wild virus but something specifically sent to me so we are interested to do this to find out more about the sender) - so he wants to run it on a virtual machine, to observe who it connects back to (the command and control (C2) infrastructure) - and if its interesting have someone reverse engineer the code. But like an idiot I pressed delete.

I've emailed them to ask if there's any way of restoring it but in the meantime I thought I'd ask here as well - is the virus gone forever or is there a way I can bring it back?

[DavidR]

The avast deletion is just that it doesn't get saved anywhere or send to the recycle bin.

But deleted files are essentially only removed from the file table (and the file space/sectors marked as free/available), so using a file recovery application may be able to recover it but the longer it is left the more chance the file will have been overwritten. Try a search for file recovery applications or undelete and see what it brings, there are many free tools out there. I would have thought an IT expert would have that in their tool kit.

[FHC]

Thank you. Haven't used that computer since so hoping for the best.

[DavidR]

You're welcome.