Kaspersky Restore Utility <Cross-Platform>

But physically, on a spinning disk or flash storage, “writing back” doesn’t always overwrite the exact same physical sectors. Sometimes the OS writes to a new location and marks the old sectors as “deleted” (but not erased).

File Carving. The Kaspersky Restore Utility scans the raw disk surface—bypassing the file system entirely. It looks for file headers, footers, and structural patterns (magic bytes for JPEG, DOCX, PDF, etc.). When ransomware encrypts a file, it usually writes the ciphertext over the original plaintext. However, due to how SSDs and HDDs handle wear leveling, TRIM commands, and slack space, fragments of the original file often remain.

Modern ransomware (post-2020) often uses the NtSetInformationFile with FileDispositionInfo to bypass the recycle bin. Some even call FSCTL_SET_ZERO_DATA to zero out clusters. The restore utility cannot recover what has been physically overwritten. Most people do this wrong. They run the tool on the infected system after the ransomware has been cleaned. That’s too late. Every second the system runs, the OS writes logs, updates, and temp files—overwriting the very sectors you want to carve. kaspersky restore utility

| File Type | Ransomware A (Legacy) | Ransomware B (Modern, full-overwrite) | Ransomware C (Delete+TRIM) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Small .txt files | 92% recovery | 0% (overwritten) | 0% | | .jpg photos | 78% recovery | 12% (partial headers) | 3% (fragments) | | .docx (ZIP structure) | 65% recovery | 0% | 0% | | .pdf | 81% recovery | 8% | 1% |

The utility is devastatingly effective against ransomware that uses "rename + encrypt + delete original" patterns. It is nearly useless against ransomware that explicitly overwrites the original sectors with random data before deletion. But physically, on a spinning disk or flash

I’m talking about the ( kavrun.exe / restore.exe ).

After testing it against three different ransomware strains (including one that overwrote files with zeros), here is everything you need to know—when it works, when it fails, and how to use it like a forensic analyst. Let’s clear up the biggest misconception immediately. The Kaspersky Restore Utility scans the raw disk

Keep a copy of restore.exe on a USB drive before you get infected. If you wait until after, downloading it onto the compromised machine might overwrite the very sectors you need to recover.

Most ransomware variants use asymmetric encryption (AES + RSA). Without the private key, you cannot mathematically reverse the encryption. This tool does not try.

The utility carves those fragments out of unallocated space, the pagefile, or even shadow copies, and reassembles them. Ransomware operates logically. It says: “Open File A → Encrypt contents → Write back to File A.”