Monday, February 23, 2009

Virus Protection : How to remove Virus from USB Drives

One of the ways by which a virus can infect your PC is through USB/Pen drives. Common viruses such as ’Ravmon’ , ‘New Folder.exe’, ‘Orkut is banned’ etc are spreading through USB drives. Most anti virus programs are unable to virus clean up and even if they do, in most cases they are unable to delete viruses, only quarantine it. Here are the things which you can do for virus protection of your USB Drive.

Whenever you plug a USB drive in your system, a window will appear similar to the one shown below



Virus Protections Trick

Don’t click on Ok , just choose ‘Cancel’. Open the Command Prompt by typing ‘cmd‘ in the run box. In the command prompt type the drive letter: and press enter . Now type dir /w/a and press enter.
This will display a list of the files in the pen drive. Check whether the following files are there or not

• Autorun.inf
• Ravmon.exe
• New Folder.exe
• svchost.exe
• Heap41a
• or any other exe file which may be suspicious.

If any of the above files are there, then probably the USB drive is infected. In command prompt type attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter. This will remove the Read Only, Archive, System and hidden file attribute from all the files. Now just delete the files using the command del filename. example del Ravmon.exe. Delete all the files that are suspicious. To be on a safer side, just scan the USB drive with an anti virus program to check whether virus clean up is complete or not. Now remove the drive and plug it again. In most of the cases, the real culprit turns out to be the “Autorun.inf” file which mostly gets executed when someone clicks Ok in the dialog window which appears above. Thus the infections can spread

Security Tip

Disable the Autoplay feature of USB drives. If you disable the Autoplay feature of USB drives, then there are lesser chances of the virus spreading. A tool which can perform such a function is Tweak UI. Download it from here install it.



Run the program. Now you can disable the Autoplay feature of the removable drives as shown above. By following the above steps, you can keep your USB virus protected.
Update: Tweak UI is a freeware software you can download it here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_tweakui/

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

thx buddy......

Hamsafar said...

Its Great.
Thanks alot

Tauseef Nasim

jee said...

really useful

Unknown said...

thank you buddy, it will help me,,,,, again thank u very much

Anonymous said...

its not doing any work efficiently