How to protect your computer from virus in pen drives

How to protect your computer from virus in pen drives

Trouble:

We have received lot of problems where computers got infected easily by the viruses in the pen drives, pen drives have become one of the most easiest carriers of various types of viruses these days.

We will tell you how pen drives normally infect your computer systems and how can you open pen drive safely and back up your important data.

How a virus in your pen drive infects?

Most of the active viruses infect your windows system as soon as you double click on the Pen Drive icon in your my computer. As virus always creates a autorun.inf file which is a system ,hidden and a read only file on your pen drive. It point to the main virus file which is also located on the pen drive. When user double clicks on the pen drive files pointed by the autorun.inf got executed which copies the virus files on your system.


Let’s see how can you protect yourself by following certain practices.


Fix:

Let’s discuss these practices one by one:

1. Disable Autorun on Your Pen Drive:

  • Open to Start >> Run and type “gpedit.msc” (without quotes) and press enter. This will open Group policy editor.
  • Browse to Administrative templates >> System >> double click on Turn off Autoplay click on Enabled and Under Settings >> Select All Drives in the drop down and click OK

2. Scan Your Pen Drive:

Whenever you insert your pen drive / portable drive into USB port on your system make sure to run a virus scan with your anti virus before opening your pen drive contents in windows explorer.

3. Use FreeCommander:

FreeCommander is again a file explorer like windows explorer, so you just need to download it by clicking here and install it.

After installing open your pen drive through FreeCommander

Check if there are some additional files like autorun.inf , Funny UST Scandal.avi.exe ,Ravmon.exe ,New Folder.exe etc or any other file which you have not copied or created, delete all these suspicious files on your pen drive.

4. Use your virus infected pen drive: You can also use your virus infected pen drives to copy your important data in worst circumstances.

How to backup your important data when your pen drive is infected with a virus

a. Insert your pen drive into the usb port, if it detects your drive you will see it in my computer.

b. Now don’t double click on your drive, rather open the pen drive contents by typing the drive letter.

For Example: type g: and press enter if your pen drive is shown as new g drive under my computer.

c. Copy your important files from your pen drive close the window and format your pen drive after then.

can infect your PC is through USB/Pen drives. Common viruses such as ’Ravmon’ , ‘New Folder.exe’, ‘Orkut is banned’ etc are spreading through USB drives. Most anti virus programs are unable to detect them and even if they do, in most cases they are unable to delete the file, only quarantine it. Here are the things which you can do if you want to remove such viruses from your USB drives

Whenever you plug a USB drive in your system, a window will appear similar to the one shown below

USB

Don’t click on Ok , just choose ‘Cancel’. Open the Command Prompt by typing ‘cmd‘ in the run box. In the command prompt type the drive letter: and press enter . Now type dir /w/a and press enter.

This will display a list of the files in the pen drive. Check whether the following files are there or not

  • Autorun.inf
  • Ravmon.exe
  • New Folder.exe
  • svchost.exe
  • Heap41a
  • or any other exe file which may be suspicious.

If any of the above files are there, then probably the USB drive is infected. In command prompt type attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter. This will remove the Read Only, Archive, System and hidden file attribute from all the files. Now just delete the files using the command del filename. example del Ravmon.exe. Delete all the files that are suspicious. To be on a safer side, just scan the USB drive with an anti virus program to check whether it is free of virus or not. Now remove the drive and plug it again. In most of the cases, the real culprit turns out to be the “Autorun.inf” file which mostly gets executed when someone clicks Ok in the dialog window which appears above. Thus the infections can spread