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.



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.

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.

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