Once before, I’ve encountered a virus that transfers the entire contents of the usb removable disk to a folder with a blank filename, and then creates a self-running link in the root directory that copies the virus to the hard disk, so that it propogates itself to any new removable disk that is connected. But this was a new breed that made the removable usb drive read-only, so much so that most except the most hard core linux utilities would fail to fix it. A friend had handed the disk over to me, requesting me to see if my “linux PC can fix it”.
The command which fixed the write protect status was:
sudo blockdev --setrw /dev/sdc1
This allowed me to remount it as read-write:
sudo mount -o rw,remount /dev/sdc1 /home/joel/usb
so that I could finally run clamscan and fix it:
clamscan --remove /home/joel/usb
To rename the folder with a blank space as name, I simply used:
mv '/home/joel/usb/ ' /home/joel/usb/ab