JerryMungo
Honorary Master
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- Jul 18, 2008
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After lots of head scratching, I have finally come up with my favourite method to prevent these annoying infections:
There are two things to do:
1) Disable autorun. Autorun is a pain in the butt and very insecure. Copy and paste the text below into a file with .reg extension, then double click the file to integrate it into the Windoze registry:
This prevents autorun from launching malware from any USB stick you pop into your PC (the one that you ran this registry patch on).
2) Prevent your own USB stick from becoming infected:
Create a folder on each volume of your stick called autorun.inf
This prevents malware on an infected PC from creating it's own autorun.inf file when you insert your flash. It's likely there may be one or two trojans that have catered for this by deleting any autorun.inf files / folders before creating it's own - i'm not aware of any myself.
This will prevent any malware copied to your stick from an infected PC from running when inserted into any other system including your own. Note that the malware may actually attempt to infect and indeed infect the stick, but since it can't be automatically run on insertion of the stick, it won't spread easily. You should also be able to scan and clean it easily enough when you get it back to your own clean / safe PC (i.e. no stealthed stuff, etc).
There are two things to do:
1) Disable autorun. Autorun is a pain in the butt and very insecure. Copy and paste the text below into a file with .reg extension, then double click the file to integrate it into the Windoze registry:
Code:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"2) Prevent your own USB stick from becoming infected:
Create a folder on each volume of your stick called autorun.inf
This prevents malware on an infected PC from creating it's own autorun.inf file when you insert your flash. It's likely there may be one or two trojans that have catered for this by deleting any autorun.inf files / folders before creating it's own - i'm not aware of any myself.
This will prevent any malware copied to your stick from an infected PC from running when inserted into any other system including your own. Note that the malware may actually attempt to infect and indeed infect the stick, but since it can't be automatically run on insertion of the stick, it won't spread easily. You should also be able to scan and clean it easily enough when you get it back to your own clean / safe PC (i.e. no stealthed stuff, etc).
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