[HowTO] Prevent Your USB Devices From Getting Infected By Viruses

sygeek · 15-05-2011, 10:09 AM

Question: How can you protect USB devices like sticks or drives from being infected with computer viruses?
Some users are lucky enough to have USB devices that have write protection switches, just like floppy drives had back in the good old days. They just need to pull the switch to write protect their devices.

Modern USB devices on the other hand do not ship with write protection switches anymore, which means that other solutions need to be discovered that work equally well.

What if you’d fill the storage on the USB device to the brim? That’s what USB Dummy Protect does. The idea is simple. You create a fake file that takes up all free space on the device. With no space left on the drive, viruses cannot write on it which means that they are blocked and cannot replicate.

The software is fully portable and needs to be placed on the USB device. You can run the program on any computer system that runs the Windows operating system.

USB Dummy Protect detects the free size on the device directly after it has been started, and begins to write a dummy file of the same size to the drive. The filename is always dummy.file.

If you need space to store files on the drive, you need to remove the dummy file first, copy or move the new files to the drive, and run USB Dummy Protect again to fill the remaining free space again with a dummy file.

The protection is basic, and advanced viruses may be able to circumvent it, for instance by deleting files on the stick to free up space before writing to the stick.

Still, USB Dummy Protect is relatively comfortable to use, especially since it is always located on the USB drive so that it can be used to write a new file whenever that is necessary.

The software worked fine on a 64-bit Windows 7 Pro test system. The developer notes that it only works on USB devices of up to 4 Gigabytes if they use the FAT file system.

You can download USB Dummy Protect from the project homepage at Google Code.

mitraark · 15-05-2011, 11:36 PM

Little troublesome

But anyway many people are plagued by this , some might have to go this far to safeguard themselves.

I would recommened creating a FOlder named "autorun.inf" , it actually prevents creation of newer autorun.inf file , blocking many possible threats !

Sarath · 16-05-2011, 12:18 AM

All 6 drives of mine got infected however careful i am so i just leave it to it now.
I think the autorun.inf one.
It even killed one of my sandisk 8GB sticks.

sygeek · 16-05-2011, 12:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mitraark

Little troublesome

But anyway many people are plagued by this , some might have to go this far to safeguard themselves.

I would recommened creating a FOlder named "autorun.inf" , it actually prevents creation of newer autorun.inf file , blocking many possible threats !

Not folder, a file. But I recommend using Panda USB Vaccine for the above purpose.
The method I mentioned above is foolproof of any viruses.

Tech.Masti · 16-05-2011, 08:39 AM

use panda USB vaccine, Bitdefender also has a same type of software, but it did not worked for me

BTW, Avira AntiVir free also blocks autorun.ini from Pen drive...

sygeek · 16-05-2011, 09:18 AM

Actually blocking autorun.inf isn't really a good choice unless you don't customize it often for your convinience. The only reason I use "USB Dummy Protect" instead "Panda USB Vaccine" is that I often customize autorun.inf files in my USB sticks according to my convenience.

CA50 · 16-05-2011, 09:46 AM

^this is not at all a feasible solution, when you have to take something form a system, you will have to delete the dummy file, then the virus will attack the pen drive and will infect it. Moreover prolong writing on a usb drive reduces it lifespan.

My advice is to use USB disk Security on your system along with your regualar AV, it will detect the usually autorun virus and will delete those. And also create a "autorun.inf" folder in your usb drive and disable autorun of the usb drives.

Though this is not 100% fool proof, but from my experience, i can say that these works and i am not infected till date

sygeek · 16-05-2011, 09:54 AM

^I've already tried the above mentioned method in my Friend's Laptop with a few of those autorun related viruses. So far none of them have affected my USB stick unless and until I insert the USB stick with a few space left. That means once the virus tried to write to the USB stick which was full, it probably was unsuccessful and gave up at exact same moment. There's another thing I've noticed that a autorun related virus won't affect the USB stick if there's already a autorun.inf file (which in my case, is there but a customized version of it).
But yeah, I agree that both of the methods aren't exactly foolproof if there's a much more advanced virus.