Prevent Viruses/Trojans From Entering Your PC Through USB/Pen/Flash Drives or Any Removable Storage Media Through Autorun Feature (Tips N Tricks) (Worldwide)

One of the most common medium by which Viruses/Trojans spread from one PC to another is via Pen/USB drives.
You insert a virus-free Pen Drive in an infected PC, the Pen Drive gets infected. Then you insert this infected Pen Drive into a vulnerable PC (a PC which is not well protected to fight viruses, maybe due to a weak or outdated or absent antivirus software), it also gets infected. This is most common phenomenon how viruses spread these days.


How Do Viruses/Trojans Actually Spread


These Viruses/Trojans actually take advantage of 'Autorun' feature which is associated with removable drives and allow any specific program(specified in the file 'Autorun.inf')' to be executed automatically as soon as the removable drive is inserted into the PC.

These malicious software write the code for infecting PC or Removable drive in this file.

How To Prevent This

First and foremost thing you should do is to have a good and updated Anti-virus Software.
Secondly, you should disable the autorun feature or block execution of autorun.inf.
Windows 7 has inbuilt feature to do this but older versions of windows are affected.

What Are The Solutions

You can block autorun file by two ways :

1. By manually editing windows registry : 

• Step 1. Start Notepad or another text editor. 
• Step 2. Copy the following text from this page and paste it into your text editor (everything between the square brackets should be all on one line)

             REGEDIT4
             [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionIniFileMappingAutorun.inf]
             @=”@SYS:DoesNotExist”

• Step 3. Save the file with a name like NoAutoRun.reg, taking care to include the .reg extension.
• Step 4. Right-click your .reg file and choose Merge. Confirm any warning prompts to add the information to the Registry.

As an extra precaution, it’s a good idea to reboot your PC after Step 4, on the off chance that some old information was residing in cache memory.

2. By Write-Protecting Pen Drive

Here is a freeware utility to make your USB flash drive write protected in single click.USB Write Protector is a portable application that prevents viruses getting copied to your flash drive themselves.

Download: USB WriteProtector

Follow these steps and be safe !!!