Thanks,
broady59 I hadn't thought of that. A read only drive is fine, but as you mention it can't be used to transfer files from another computer. I know a lot of techs load their flash drives with cleanup tools and take it with them to clean up infected computers, which is a good way to use such a drive. But most people won't limit themselves to that so it's better to have some kind of protection.
Kunal Shah, on Oct 21 2009, 05:53 AM, said:
Vaccinate means ONLY to disable autorun.inf ????
I already have disabled autorun.inf on my computer by smart virus remover.
But what i want is some software which will prevent common viruses like new folder.exe, recycle.exe, restore.exe, regvsr.exe from entering USB drives from an infected computer.
Does creating an folder named new folder.exe and making it read-only prevent new folder.exe?
Not really, there is too much malware using autorun on Flash drives to try to prevent in that way and setting files to read only is easily defeated. Besides, the protection provided by Flash Disinfector will prevent those files from ever executing. I've explained how this works in another post:
Click here
The weakness of any malware is that it has to shut down when you turn off or restart your computer. You won't knowingly reopen the malware program so it has to set itself to load automatically when windows starts. That is what is known as a loading point. You can have all kinds of nasty malware files present on your drives, but they won't affect you if they aren't running/loaded into memory. Similarly, you won't knowingly run the malware present on a Flash Drive--that's done by the autorun "feature" of Windows and the autorun.inf file that can be written by malware. The autorun.inf file is the loading point. In my post I compare the autorun.inf file to a gun--the bullets (the malware files) are useless without the gun. Or, if you prefer, another analogiy would be that disabling autorun is like cutting off the head--the body is still there but it's dead and won't do anything.
I can understand why you would want to keep malicious files from getting on your Flash drives in the first place, but with the inoculation of Flash Disinfector in place, you really don't have to worry about them. The inactive malicious payload files should be easily cleaned up when you scan the drive with your antivirus.
If you really want to keep malicious files off the drive there are a few things you can do. The first is most obvious--simply don't insert your drive into a computer when you have no control of its security. If you don't know if the computer is infected or not, ask who uses it what kind of security they have in place. If they have no antivirus installed then there is a good chance the computer is infected, so don't insert your Flash drive. Second, if you aren't sure or you absolutely have to copy files from that computer, get a scan run on that computer. If you can't get the computer user to do it, then you can use the Flash drive itself. Install ClamWin antivirus on the Flash Drive and then have it scan the computer and the Flash drive.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&cli...oq=&aqi=g10
Or you can wait til you insert the Flash drive back into your computer. Since Flash Disinfector has made it so that the malicious files have no way to load, you can use your own antivirus to scan the drive and clean them up.
In my other post I've listed some other programs that will do what you asked about--but since you have already run Flash Disinfector, you don't really need them.
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