Disable data writing on your USB drive to protect it from viruses

Trouble:

Majority of the virus problem which we receive from the readers are those cases which infect the system through pen drives. According to our records about 40 percent of the total computer systems got virus or trojan infection through pen drives and USB portable devices like iPOd, Mp3 players etc.

Yesterday, I found a cool utility called Thumbscrew : USB Write Blocker , you can use this utility to disable writing to your USB drive. You can read full review about the utility here

Let’s see how can you use this utility to protect your drive from viruses

Fix:

Thumbscrew is small handy utility which you can take any where on your pen drive use it to protect your pen drive from viruses on other computer systems by disabling Writing on that system. You can download thumbscrew here.

Follow the procedure below to protect your pen drive from viruses

1. In order to protect your pen drive from viruses you need to create a blank file named autorun.inf through notepad and place it in the root directory.

2. When you insert pen drive on any virus infected computer system it will throw a message that some thing is trying to copy and replace a file located in the root directory of your USB device and that is nothing but a virus.

So don’t allow the virus to replace the file on your drive.

3. Open your pen drive and double click the thumbscrew.exe to start it , it will get loaded into your system tray.

Select the option as shown in the images below

Disable USB Writing ( as shown in the image below)

Enable USB Writing ( as shown in the image below )

Caution:

Make sure to enable USB writing before you remove your pen drive from the computer as this small utility plays with the registry which affects the computer not your pen drive on which you have inserted your pen drive.

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