Disabling autorun in Windows is a must especially if you’re like me who doesn’t run an antivirus. Most of the time an experience computer user is able to determine if a file is dangerous or not by looking at the icon, file name, double extension, file size and where it is downloaded from. No matter how experience or smart the computer users is, some day he/she will be careless. I can never forget that one nasty virus managed to get into my computer and corrupted all my executable (.exe) files because I was “careless” and tired after a hard days work. All I did was open My Computer, double click on the drive letter to access my USB pen drive and poof! that activated the virus via hidden autorun.inf.

The best solution I’d say is to create a registry key that totally disables Windows from processing autorun.inf file. A year ago I’ve shared with you all on how to do that by creating a registry key and then merge it into your computer. If you have trouble editing registry, then here is a tool from Panda Security that is able to do the exact same thing with a click of a button. I know that it works exactly the same as the registry tweak I posted last year by using SysTracer to take my system’s snapshot and then comparing the snapshots from before and after vaccination.
How Panda Research USB Vaccine works

Panda Security has recently came up with a small portable tool that is able to “vaccine” your computer from virus that spreads through external USB drives. The computer vaccination prevents your computer from executing autorun.inf file and the USB drive vaccination creates a dummy autorun.inf file in your external usb drive so that virus can’t infect it.
Protect USB drive against virus
It is weird that when I ran USB Vaccine on my laptop and saw that my computer is NOT vaccinated although I remembered very clearly that I’ve already disabled autorun.inf via the registry tweak. If I am not wrong, the setting was removed by registry cleaner software. So for those that use registry cleaners, make sure you run USB Vaccine after finish scanning and cleaning.

A lot of newer generation antivirus software such as the latest ESET v4, RISING 2009, Kaspersky 2009 and etc has protection against USB virus. Still, it is always better to disable autorun.inf because if your USB drive has a virus that is yet to be detected by the antivirus software, your computer will be a victim of the virus.

Just wanted to share an experience with you all. In one of my workplace where I maintain hundreds of HP computers, disabling autorun.inf GREATLY reduced the risk of the computers being infected by virus. On computers that I did not vaccine, it took merely a few days for the whole computer lab to get infected by virus and I had to clone them all over again.

[ Download Panda USB Vaccine ]


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