Protecting yourself

Tuesday July 07, 2009 , 2 min Read

**- against viruses spreading via Pendrives**....

USB Flash drives are the most common tool to quickly transfer data from one system toanother. Its a daily utility for almost all of us. But with all the ease and comfort a pendrive brings in, there is equal amount of pain! Over the past one year the maximum amount of Virus alerts I have seen on my system were upon inserting a pendrive. Each time I lend my USB drive to a friend, it comes back infected with some notorious virus that autoruns as soon as I insert the USB.

While over the past few months most antiviruses have become smart enough to detect this, I still fear these autorun viruses. I always hoped that some flash drive manufacturer would add a simple utility like a write protection toggle as seen in SD cards (this would have ensured that using my pendrive on some public computer won't affect it, unless I need to copy some files from there). But that didn't happen. All we saw was a pendrive integrated with a antivirus by Transcend (thus putting an additional software cost on our head?).

Something that I have been using since almost a year is a USB firewall. It scans any removable memory as soon as you connect them and restricts any autorun files, allowing you to review and delete them. This tool alone has insured that my system was never affected by those viruses spreading via pendrives. It would be reasonable for system administrators to make such a tool standard in all systems at a corporate office. You can download this free USB Firewall here.

"A technology lover who wakes up every morning with a wish to see new gadgets, Annkur P Agarwal is the Editor of the OnlyGizmos Network and an e-commerce consultant based in Mumbai."

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