Most of the active viruses infect your windows system as soon as you double click on
the Pen Drive icon in your my computer. As virus always creates a autorun.inf file
which is a system ,hidden and a read only file on your pen drive. It point to the
main virus file which is also located on the pen drive. When user double clicks on
the pen drive files pointed by the autorun.inf got executed which copies the virus
files on your system.
The image below shows the Autorun file entries in some special characters when you
right click on the drive.
Let’s see how can you protect yourself by following certain practices.
Fix:
Let’s discuss these practices one by one:
1. Disable Autorun on Your Pen Drive:
* Open to Start >> Run and type “gpedit.msc” (without quotes) and press enter.
This will open Group policy editor.
* Browse to Administrative templates >> System >> double click on Turn off
Autoplay click on Enabled and Under Settings >> Select All Drives in the drop down
and click OK (as shown in the image below)
2. Scan Your Pen Drive:
Whenever you insert your pen drive / portable drive into USB port on your system make sure to run a virus scan with your anti virus before opening your pen drive contents in windows explorer.
3. Use FreeCommander:
FreeCommander is again a file explorer like windows explorer, so you just need to
download it by clicking here and install it.
After installing open your pen drive through FreeCommander (as shown in the image
below)
Check if there are some additional files like autorun.inf , Funny UST Scandal.avi.exe ,Ravmon.exe ,New Folder.exe etc or any other file which you have not copied or created, delete all these suspicious files on your pen drive.
4. Use your virus infected pen drive: You can also use your virus infected pen
drives to copy your important data in worst circumstances.