How to protect your computer from virus in pen drives

Trouble:

We have received lot of problems where computers got infected easily by the viruses in the pen drives, pen drives have become one of the most easiest carriers of various types of viruses these days.

We will tell you how pen drives normally infect your computer systems and how can you open pen drive safely and back up your important data.

How a virus in your pen drive infects?

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.

Quick Update: 26th March 2008

4. Use your virus infected pen drive: You can also use your virus infected pen drives to copy your important data in worst circumstances.

How to backup your important data when your pen drive is infected with a virus

a. Insert your pen drive into the usb port, if it detects your drive you will see it in my computer.

b. Now don’t double click on your drive, rather open the pen drive contents by typing the drive letter.

For Example: type g: and press enter if your pen drive is shown as new g drive under my computer.    

c. Copy your important files from your pen drive close the window and format your pen drive after then.

If you are still suspicious about the existence virus files on your pen drive, you can remove virus from your pen drive through command prompt by the method suggested by Madhur here in this article

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