Pendrive and Virus - How much is the risk of pen drive being prone to virus and infections

Posted Date: 06-Jul-2010		Category: General Security Issues
Author: shivani sathi	Member Level: Gold
Rating:	Points: 15 (Rs 10)

In this resource i would like to introduce about the rik of pendrive being prone to infections. I would also like to make you familiar with the procedure of making your pen drive safe to use without any fear of threats.

USB Drives(Pen Drives) and Virus

Was your system virus free till yesterday and suddenly to your surprise you have found that three virus have attacked your system. Wondering, how it happened when you have not connected to internet during this span from yesterday to today morning. Once recall the events that you have performed on your computer. Listened to music, copied some important documents that your friend has given you and played minesweeper. These are the events right.

Okay, now you might be still breaking your head on how this happened. Let me tell you and relieve you from the suspense. You might have copied the documents from your friends pen drive to your computer and this is where the virus has attacked your computer.

This is true. USB drives or pen drives are one of the major physical carriers of computer viruses.

Though USB/pen drives are carriers of viruses, one need not worry of being attacked if he/she follows some simple steps.

1) Do not open a pen drive immediately after plugging in to the USB port.
2) Disable auto run functionality of the pen drive.
3) Scan for viruses before attempting to open the pendrive.

The above are the minimal things to be done while connecting a pen drive to your system.

Now let me introduce few more steps which when followed will always save your computer from virus attacks.

As soon as you plug in a pen drive, a window prompting to open the files and folders appears with two options. One is to click on OK and the other is to click on CANCEL.

Do remember NOT to click on OK. Always click on cancel.

Suppose you have some important documents in one of the pen drives of your friend, and on running the scan on it you came to know that it is infected. Now you might wonder how to use it. You can definitely use it once you follow the below steps and remove the virus from it.

1) Plug in the pen drive to the USB port.
2) Once it is plugged in, go to My Computer and make a note of the drive (E, F, G, H etc)
3) Click on Start --> Run
4) Type cmd and press Enter
5) The command prompt opens up.
6) If the drive is E, then type E: and press enter.
7) Now type DIR /w/a and press enter.
8) A list of files that are present in the pendrive are displayed.
9) Check if the files like autorun.inf, svchost.exe or any other such suspicious files are present which you or your friend might not have saved. Presence of such files indicate that the pen drive has been infected.
10) If so then type attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter.
11) This will remove the suspicious file attributes.
12) Now type del until all the suspicious files are removed.
13) Now rescan the pen drive to reverify the presence of viruses.
14) Plug out and re plug the device to the USB port and access it happily.

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