Precautions while using pendrives

Troubleshooting      Comments Off

Sep
13

Precautions

1. Double-clicking a drive may infect your computer with the virus on the drive.
2. Even Right-click ? Open or Right-click ? Explore may lead to the virus infection.
3. If you think that autorun.inf can infect only if its in the root folder of a drive, then you are wrong. Think again. Even network drives have autorun properties. A network drive linked to a folder, containing an infecting autorun.inf file, on a network behaves the same way, when you double-click the drive.

Using Autorun.inf Folder

If you create a folder named AUTORUN.INF in the root directory of a drive, most of the viruses are unable to delete such folders to replace with their own infecting autorun.inf file, this is possible because almost all the virus programs have codes to replace/delete the autorun.inf file and not the folder. You may be safe for sometime, but not longer until a better virus breaks in.

Best Practices

1. To view files inside a drive to use the tree-view of Windows Explorer.
   My Computer ? View ? Explorer Bar ? Folders
   Click on the removable/pendrive on the left side tree-view folder panel to explore, instead of double-clicking the drive.
2. Typing the drive name on the address-bar of Windows Explorer.
   My Computer ? click on Address Bar ? Type x:\