5 Tips to fight Pen/USB Drive Viruses
Pen drives has revolutionized the way we share data. Every now and then one of your friend pops into your house with his pen drive and inserts it into your System to copy what ever he wants and ends up infecting your system with some virus without his/her knowledge. In this post I decided to share what precautions that I take to prevent my system getting infected. It requires some effort and patience at the beginning but it will become a habit soon. After all someone told.. precaution is better than cure right ?
Disable Autorun on All drives :
All the USB related viruses exploit this feature to spead themselves. Autorun was mainly introduced for removable disks like CD/DVD ROMS so that they automatically run themselves without troubling the user to find the particular file. The root directory of the Drive consists of a file called Autorun.inf that contains the information to run the executable. For eg. Path of the presentation exe etc. We will just disable this feature , which will help us in a great deal to prevent the USB Drive virus.
To disable this feature :
- Go to Start > Run (windows key + r)
- Type gpedit.msc (This opens the Group Policy)
- Browse to Administrative Templates > System
- Double Click on “Turn Off Autoplay” for the right side Settings
- Select Enable and in the dropdown box select All Drives and click OK.
Delete Any Autorun.inf files :
The first Tip will only disable Virus from spreading itself. There is a good chance that your drive may contain this Autorun.inf file from your previous infection. This file is actually hidden and made readonly so it is not directly visible on your local drive. I personally use a tool called “Filezilla” to see the contents of the USB Drive before I access it via Windows Explorer.
Filezilla is basicaly a free FTP Client software that helps you to download or upload files via the FTP protocol. But Filezilla shows all the files in the directory irrespective of it’s visibility. So I use this feature of Filezilla to look into the USB Drive. If the USB Drive has any autorun.inf file, just right click on the Autorun.inf file and click edit. This will show you the content of the Autorun.inf file. Autorun.inf file is basically a text file. See the path of the exe it points to and delete that exe, com, pf from there.
You can download filezilla from here.
Kill Running process :
I use another handy tool called Task Killer . This is a small freeware that is very helpful to kill the running Virus Process. You might be asking why I need a tool to kill a process, when I can directly kill the process from Task Manager. Well, yes you can kill any task from the Task Manager but the problem is few of the viruses does not allow the Task manger to be visible. It automatically closes the Task Manager window and thus stopping yourself from identifying it. Task Killer is a small utility that sits on the Task Bar. Just click on it and select the Process you want to kill.
Make sure you don’t end up killing any windows task. Make sure you have saved and backed up all your important data before you attempt to do any of these methods which I have mentioned here. Since we are forcing windows settings which can make the OS unstable. Most of the time the virus process name will be exactly same as windows process name, making it a bit harder to identify. But another small tip that can help you is.. all virus process runs under “Your username” process. Windows critical processes run under System Process.
Keep Your Antivirus Updated At All Times :
This is a pretty obvious tip, but it saves a lot of trouble later. I have seen many of my friends who have disabled the Auto Update feature, I strongly disagree to it. Just enable the damn Auto update and it will take care of the updates. After all Anti viruses are meant to detect virus and save your time from manual removal.
Use Linux :
This is probably the weirdest tip but trust me if you use Linux you don’t have to worry about any of the tips mentioned above. Linux has probably the least number of viruses available. To those who have come late, linux has come long way from being a Geeks only OS. Some distro’s like Mandriva, Linspire,Open SUSE are customized to be more user friendly. With KDE 4.0 you can be sure you have all the eye candy that can even put Vista to shame.
I hope you would have found these tips useful.
~>NanoJeba<~
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