PC Tonic

USB drives (pen drives / thumb drives / USB sticks) are indispensible for carrying a few gigs of data around with ease. Low cost, reliability, superfast transfer speeds, and the drag-and-drop abilities have made them immensely popular today. But all this convenience comes with a price as well – it’s damn easy for viruses and worms to infect a USB drive and, worse still, it is equally easy for your PC to get that infection from the drive. I’ve stayed in a hostel long enough to know that infections carried in a thumb drive are usually too smart to infiltrate a PC even in the presence of a good antivirus. So, what’s the way out? Just a few easy steps, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble.

Look for symptoms

It’s usually not very difficult to make out an infected thumb drive from uninfected ones. For example, it could present itself as a folder instead of a drive :

Also, you may get error messages while trying to eject (safely remove) the drive.

Use WinPatrol

Most antiviruses have real time protection, that keep checking for malware and suspicious activities in the background. However, this doesn’t stop most malware from sneaking into your computer’s startup list, or the registry files. WinPatrol comes to the recue by monitoring every single nook and corner of your PC for suspicious activities. With WinPatrol, you’ll be immediately warned if there’s a change in your startup list, or your browser is hijacked, or some unknown script tries to execute itself. With WinPatrol, you can rest assured that your PC isn’t going to be tinkered with some crazy little malware.

Disable AutoPlay

Windows has a feature called AutoPlay which pops up a bunch of options every time you plug in an external drive.

This feature might be good for productivity, but it also helps malware to attack your PC automatically. Thankfully, AutoPlay can be disabled without much hassle. In Windows XP, go to Start > Run, and type gpedit.msc in the box. In Vista, you simply have to click on the Start orb and type gpedit.msc in the search bar. The Local Group Policy Editor window will appear, where you’ll have to navigate as shown in the two screenshots below (click to enlarge them) : 

 The good ol’ antivirus

I wrote bad things about antiviruses above, but the fact remains that they’re ultimately responsible for detecting and removing malware. Keep your antivirus updated and on, and scan your thumb drives immediately after plugging them in (before opening the contents).

It’s really easy for malware to infect your PC from the thumb drive, but then it’s not really difficult for you either to ward them off as well.