An Unofficial guide to spywares and online safety ..

[din]

Great info. Thank you Batty. Copy pasted to the syllabus wiki

@others - asked his permission before doing that !

[hpotter606]

The best way to prevent a virus/trojan etc from entering your PC through pen drives is to use address bar to open the them instead of double clicking the pen drive. A lot of people are unaware of this.When i was unaware of this, I used to search *.* in the pen drive with hidden files enabled. A virus cant run by itself if you are not executing it by some way. This feels like Harry potter teaching Dumbledore's army the Expelliarmus spell . Many people will say that they know this but many wont. This is most simple and yet very effective way prevent viruses from entering your computer.

Also many virus/Trojans can be manually removed if the view hidden files and system files are enabled.Usually .bat , .exe, .vbs types of files are viruses. Also remember to remove autorun.inf file.

I hope this information helps.

[it_waaznt_me]

^^ But the problem is by default Autorun is set to be enabled on Windows machines .. You may use Panda's USB Vaccine for your pendrives so that if you insert it into an infected machine, your pen drive will not become infective ...

[hpotter606]

Well it only opens a box giving me the options to choose about how to open the drive. I can easily press cancel and open it from address bar. Then again if the drive automatically opens in a computer, we can simply turn off the autorun feature. I usually use tune up utilities to turn of autorun but there must be a way to do it without tune up.
I used my machine for around 5-6 months without antivirus but I used a firewall for internet. Not once did my machine get infected. I would simply open the drive from address bar and delete the viruses manually (with hidden and system files enabled).

I was telling this method just so that if the antivirus is not updated or the tools like the USB vaccine are not available to the person, he can still prevent the virus from entering the computer which makes it the simplest method. Otherwise the antivirus can do the job.