How in the Tech

Vaccinate your USB Thumb Drive

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 23, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Security

In the early days of computing history viruses spread from system to system generally via the not-missed floppy drive. There Internet surely didn’t exist and most computers weren’t even networked together even though they resided in the same location. So this sneaker-net was the only way for malware to spread. Fast-forward to today, every type of malware utilizes some form of networking to do it’s damage but the idea of spreading via sneaker-net is not lost. USB thumb drives are the floppy drive of yesterday and carry similar risks and warnings from that era.

Windows utilizes an autorun.inf on removable drives and devices that can be configured to perform particular actions without any intervention from the user. While there is a lot of good that comes from this, there is also a whole lot of bad. An infected thumb drive can infect it’s new host simply by mounting the drive. You’ve likely heard of the latest virus scare titled Conficker – this virus spread both by the Internet and local networks, but also via USB drives.

So what can you do to protect your system? The best is to disable the autorun functionality, either on your computer or on the thumb drive itself. USB Vaccine, a free utility from Panda Security, can help facilitate this step. Once installed you are able to vaccinate an entire computer – effectively disabling all autorun functionality, or on a USB thumb drive case by case basis. The latter option is advantageous if you will be distributing the thumb drive amongst your colleagues.

One caveat worth mentioning, a vaccinated thumb drive cannot have the autorun functionality reapplied without a complete wiping of the USB drive in question. You are, however, able to go back and forth with the vaccination on the entire computer itself.

Panda Security’s USB Vaccine is available for versions of Windows from 2000 and on.