Free Virus Protection for Your Pen Drive

Software companies will utilize your fear of computer viruses and sell you whatever they want. Computer viruses can spread through various routes such as an email, clicking on an unsafe link, browsing hacked websites, etc. One of the most common routes for the spread of computer viruses is removable devices such as Pen Drives. These have various names such as memory stick, USB flash drive, USB stick, data drive, thumb drive, etc. Irrespective of what you call it, the fact is that Pen Drives are responsible for a significant percentage of cases involving computer viruses and other malware. You can buy a fancy software program to protect your Pen Drive, but that’s not necessarily needed. You can actually protect your pen drive for free. Here’s how:

Step I: Create undeletable folders

When any virus or malware infects your pen drive, it creates folders with the name autorun.ini and autorun.inf. So, what you need to do is create these folders inside your pen drive. To ensure these folders are not deleted by the virus, you need to create other folders inside the primary folders with the names CON, AUX, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, PRN, NUL. These are identified as system files and Windows does not delete them. Then you need to give three attributes to the primary folders – read-only, system, and hidden. This can be done using the command “attrib autorun.ini +r +s +h”. Use the same command for autorun.inf folder. This method works since the virus is not able to create the autorun.ini and autorun.inf folders in your pen drive. You have already created undeletable folders with the same name, which prevents the virus from infecting your pen drive.

Step II: Disable auto-play

It’s common knowledge that viruses and malware utilize the auto-play function in Windows PCs to spread from one computer to another through removable drives. If you turn off the auto-play function on your Windows PC, it will stay protected from all infected removable drives such as pen drives. The auto-play function was provided to enhance user experience, but it makes the computer vulnerable to virus and malware attacks. You can turn off the auto-play function from the control panel. You may have to compromise some of the convenienceassociated with auto-play, but it would be worth it, as it will protect your PC from infectedremovable drives.

These two steps are adequate to protect you pen drive and your PC from various viruses and malware attacks. It’s completely free and the entire procedure can be completed in less than 10 minutes. So, think twice before buying pricey virus protection software.