Gone are those days when low capacity Floppy diskettes were used for storing and transferring the data. Not only were they slow but also had short life time. After floppy disks, technical world switched to the Compact Disks. Re-Writable disk was a great achievement in this regard. But the 700 MB CDs are definitely not sufficient in today’s data centric world. So DVDs largely replaced CDs. Though both are still in use, but advent of USB i.e. universal serial bus technology has changed the trend followed in data. USB drives also known as PEN Drives are smaller than Floppy disks and depending on the prices it can have capacity varying from 64 MB to 64 GB. It offers an advantage over all the above as it is highly portable and has comparatively longer life. Owing to its low cost, low power consumption and small size it is now choice of every user, and needless to say that it has already reached to hands of most of the users. But the latest trend observed in the computer security breaches and spread of virus and worms have revealed that USB devices have become the easiest tool ever to spread the worm, infect your PCs and Laptops and attack other computers connected to your computer. USB drives are very insecure as mostly they are not write protected. Whenever you insert your USB drive to any infected PC, worms can ride on your USB data traveler, and when you use the device again with other PCs it get transmitted. USB allows the threat to spread even faster than plague. So before you use your USB you should be careful as either your USB or the machine you are working on may contain the virus. Your antivirus suit must be updated otherwise your PC can be infected easily while you are surfing on internet.
Actually autorun feature enables the virus to load into memory as soon as you insert your PEN drive. These threats were with CDs and DVDs too but since they could not be over written so the threats were limited. But in case of USB, worms get collected from all the PCs it was used with and the result could be disastrous. One of the recommended steps is to disable the autorun from the registry and scan the USB drive every time you plug it in. If your antivirus is out of date then view the content of USB drive using command prompt. I use the same procedure and it has worked well till now. Don’t know why but with command prompt the virus in the device were inactive. It could be due to the disabling the autorun from registry.
To disable the Autoplay visit How to disable Autoplay at ALC2005.com.
You can follow what I do often to check myself for worms and viruses:
1. Start|Run|cmd
// To open command prompt
2. I:
// changing the drive to USB’s drive assuming that it is I drive.
3. Dir /AH
// this is the DOS command to view the hidden content of the directory. It is highly useful especially when you “folder options” is disabled by the Trojans.
4. See the contents of the directory by above command and find if there is any unwanted file with suspected extensions such as .exe, .vbs or the file with multiple extensions such as xyx.txt.exe.
5. If such file exists then delete it forcefully as they may not be deleted by simple delete.
Type following:
I:> del /f /AH
Apart from this you should always access your PEN drives by right click and explore option. Hope these steps would help you. Please write comments for any queries and related threat problems.
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Tags: Security Issues by Deepak
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