Flash drives are virus magnets. This is a
generally accepted truth, but today I learned it firsthand.
As you may recall from my previous post on
copying files to flash drives, my wife needed to take a
PowerPoint presentation with her to school. The drive was malware-free when it
left here--but it came home with a virus!
I found this out when I popped the drive
into my PC--and Microsoft Security Essentials immediately detected (and
removed, thankfully) an extremely dangerous worm. No doubt it had landed there
when the missus plugged the drive into one of the school machines.
This was a catastrophe barely averted.
This particular worm propagates over network connections, so it could have
spread very quickly to every system in my house. That's why it's crucial to
have reliable anti-virus software installed on all your PCs.
Okay, but how do you protect your flash
drive when it's "out and about"? How can you keep it from getting
infected in the first place--or at least remove any sneakyware before it comes
home with you?
My tool of choice: SUPERAntiSpyware
Portable Scanner. The program requires no installation; you just
copy it to your flash drive (see the aforementioned post if you don't know how
to do that), then run it whenever you want to check for and remove infections.
You should also consider running Panda USB Vaccine, which disables a flash drive's Autorun.inf
file--a common carrier for malware (including the one that hit me today). Doing
so will prevent the drive's Autorun box from appearing when you plug it into
your PC, but that's no biggie--you just have to open the drive manually.
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