How to Prevent USB virus attack
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
USB drives have become the modern path for viruses. As usb drives are becoming more and more popular, the viruses are also becoming popular. A few tweaks in the settings can help you from great danger of virus attacks from the pen drives.
Most of these type viruses use the autorun feature of the windows to attach the PC. Autorun feature helps windows to detect the contents of the flash drive or CD drives and present the user with a set of options for easy access to the contents. For this windows reads the contents automatically even if we don't open our virus infected pen drives (usb flash drives). So if virus is present in the pen drive, it will be infected automatically.
To prevent this from happening, we need to disable autorun feature of windows. It can be dome in two ways. One using registry and other using a small program called tweakUI.
Using REGISTRY
Open notepad, (or your favorite text editor) and put the following code in it
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"
and save as a .reg file (for eg: autorun.reg). After that double click that file and a window will appear and ask for the confirmation to save it to registry. Click OK.
Using TweakUI
Download tweakUI (a small application from Microsoft for customization of xp). Install it.
Run tweakUI, and from the left side, under the MY COMPUTER, choose "autorun", Select the type option.
Untick the option, Enable autorun for removable drives. and select ok.
Done.
How to disable autorun with tweakui
NOW WHAT
So you have successfully disabled autorun. Now you shouldn't double click the flash drives. You can use the explore feature to see if there are any hidden files in the flash drives. (Don't use right click option to explore, use the Explore folders option that appears in the toolbar, with an image of 2 folders.) You can expand pen drives from there and see the files in your flash drive.
Explore view of windows file browser
Future post: How to remove the usb virus
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Thanks for good information! I’ll try this.
thanks for the information,..
nice blog
Many cybercafes in my neighbourhood dont even allow customers to plug in USB drives. Your suggestion to disable the autorun feature sounds excellent. I hope cybercafes would do that and allow customers to use USBs.
Its better to prevent virus than to remove it from the system after affecting.
now this is some useful post! yesterday all the PCs in my school network got owned cause of this
this is really pain in the butt i tell you, but no more
Many thanks Sandeep, this is very usefull information, I’ll try it..
I think this is only a temporary solution, when we use thumbdrive, then copy and paste activity won’t be avoided, and nothing can guarantee that file are virus free.
The only solution for this problem IMHO, is using virus free system, either using Windows with a lot of, updated virus database or using Linux.
I’m using Linux for almost 3 years, and never been infected with any virus at all and the side effect is my resource didn’t ate by that monstrous anti virus app
I actually had no idea this was happening, thanks for the heads up
Thanks man, virus attack is keep on going crazy every time, we need every thing there;s need to know about how to prevent it from happening
That is a very good explanation of the auto run feature and how windows opens the file without you knowing .Especially if you are using a fileshare ,care is needed when transferring from one pc to another , if , as I do ,you use your old outdated laptop for the share so as not to keep infecting your main pc (which you use for credit card details and such).. Worst I have found is avg 8 finding viruses and disabling them , when they are not , like the alexa ie6 toolbar!
The ‘autorun.inf’ is a system file. So you need to make the settings to ‘Show’ hidden files and system files, in order to see that file.
That’s an interesting article. I just wondered if you could tell me where to find more info on this topic ?
Nice post. I usually use Auto Run Eater to protect me from USB virus.
Hey Sandeep!
I have written a similar article a few days ago where you can vaccinate your pen drive so that malware dont get a chance to spread through pen drives.
Its here on my blog : http://blog.ashfame.com/2009/06/vaccinate-usb-drives-to-prevent-virus-infection/
There are many little things that we don’t know but suffered cause of that. Like you shared a good solution for removing the virus from USB. Good topic shared thanks, I will try it.
Yeah this could help, and my first job after plugging anyone else USB is to scan it first whether they’ve viruses or not.
On Linux, I have no worries about viruses but yes on Windows, I have to scan them to make sure they don’t enter in my PC.
Thanks for the tip.
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Mark Hostetler
Thanks for the value informations , I had 2 USB attack by virus and make my laptop hang!!So sad…