USB drives are a carrier of autorun viruses. It may be possible that your computer is not infected with any virus and also your USB drive is clean. But what if your friend brings a USB drive and inserts that drive in your computer? Chances are that drive may be infected. A possible solution in this case is to always scan the USB flash drive first before opening, so that if there is any threat found, that antivirus program can take care of.
Many antiviruses have this scan on plug feature, that prompts you to scan the drive, as soon as the drive is inserted. But here’s another smart solution that can protect your USB drive from such autorun virus threats.
How to Protect USB Drives from Autorun Virus
BiDefender, a leading company developing products to protect users from internet threats like viruses, trojans, spywares, phishers, etc. have launched a new tool known as USB Immunizer. This small tool can help protect your USB flash drives, SD card or any other portable media against USB autorun virus.
This small utility has two advantages:
Firstly, it protects your USB storage device or SD card against infections with autorun based malwares. Thus, even if your drive has been plugged into an infected computer, the malware won’t be able to create its autorun.inf file. USB Immunizer will only list and immunize drives that are detected as removable media.
Secondly, this program can also immunize the computer. The immunize computer slider helps you to toggle the autorun feature On or Off for any removable media (except for CD/DVD-ROM devices). If this option is set to On, then the infected USB drive cannot harm the computer, as it will not auto-execute the malware located on the USB drive.
How USB Immunizer Works:
- Download USB Immunizer and run
- Plug in the USB drive, and it will auto-detect the drive
- Select the USB drive from the drop down menu and click on “Immunize” button
- That’s it, now your drive is protected from autorun.inf viruses.
You can also toggle that “Computer Immunization” to ON. This way, your computer will be protected from these nasty autorun virus threats.
When you insert a USB drive for the first time, this utility will auto-detect it and will present an option to immunize the drive. Click on “Yes, Immunize” button.
Basically, this tool creates an autorun.inf which is harmless and places that file in the root of the drive. Also the file is created with special permission, so that it prevent the user or malware from altering the autorun.inf file. If in future you want to delete this autorun.inf file, then you’ll need to use Linux live CD or Mac OS, as the file cannot be deleted from Windows based PC.
Use this utility and stay safe. What’s more, you can also immunize your friends USB drive, so that both computers remain protected from such threats.
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