G'day all,

I'm working on a computer rebuild (multiple trojans) for a neighbour, and when I tried to verify a backup made of their iTunes library, a whole bunch of the AAC (and M4A) files were found with what looks like the right length (filesize), but the file data is all nulls (zeros).

There is no header data, no tags, no nothing.

It's not ALL the files, just some albums have all the filenames and album artwork and so on, but some of the albums contain nothing but "blank" tracks.

Is this normal? Is this an artefact of protected copying or something? Or has anyone seen this kind of thing happen with any trojan problems?

I have lots of experience with RIFF WAV formats, and I'm learning about copy protection mechanisms in container format files, but I haven't seen completely "blank" files before, except many decades ago in some installers that would copy blank files and populate the data from a library elsewhere on the install disk.

Any suggestions would be welcomed.

Thanks in advance,
PCPete