How to Protect your Flash Drive from Viruses/ trojans/ worms ect...
I have been working on computers for a wile now,and i found that a flash drive can hide some real bad things for the un-savvy computer user.So here is the scenario, Bob has some real rocking tunes on this PC,his friend Jack thinks so too.Jack gives Bob his Flash Drive to copy over the sweet Mp3's.Unknown to both of them Bob's PC has a real bad Virus on it. Bob dose not have a Antivirus on his PC and Bob, got a virus from clicking where he was not suppose to on a girly website.The second that Jack's Flash drive is inserted,the virus jumps onto it,Creating a Autorun.ini file connected to a newly created mysterious.exe, all the folders on the Flash drive gets hidden and shortcuts to the mysterious.exe is created with The hidden folder's names.
Jack goes home and plug his flash drive in and opens what he thinks is a folder with some MELOdies in,since Jack never updated his Antivirus his Antivirus cant identify the threat, and he gets Infected.
Kinda reminds me of a STD of some sort,and shows me the irony of Bob that could not keep it in his pants
The Point is If Bob and Jack had a up-to-date Antivirus this could not happen so easily.
Protection is Key in every computerized device these days from PCs to Cellphones but if you did not know this you wont be reading this thread.
As a PC technician/advanced user you may have found that ever so often you had to clean your flash drive from a Bob's stupidity,even if you just needed to copy some files to his PC
Thankfully There is several ways to keep the nastys off our flash drive:
1.Get a Flash drive with a hardware Read-Only switch
In the olden days we use to have floppys and stiffys (no innuendo intended)with a little switch to keep unwanted writing to occur,this continued to be the case for the first Flash drives.But rite around 512MB flash drives the swish started to mysteriously vanish,Inciting a new era of Electronic terrorny,
Flash drives with a hardware Read-Only switch is as scarce as chicken teeth these days but you may be able to find one for a arm and a leg,Note that SD cards have a "Soft-Switsh" that tells the software to not write information Here is some info on software Read-Only;
http://blog.ashfame....humb-pen-drive/
2.Get a AV for your FD
ESET is working on a program that will be run on a Bob's computer from a flash drive to protect only the flash drive ,its called ClevX DriveSecurity, and costs about the same amount as a antivirus per flash drive. find it here: http://go.eset.com/us/partners/clevx/
The problem with this is that it has to be run from the flash drive by the user,and by that time its too late
here is others too:
http://www.hongkiat....ted-usb-drives/
3.Hardware encripting
This new fad is just to keep documents save from prying eyes, as soon as the password is inserted the flash drive is free gain too Viruses,and it costs more than a pretty penny
And since its encrypted from the get go its useless as a boot-able Flash drive
See here fore more info
http://www.transcend...=100&axn=Detail
4.Software encryption
There is plenty ways to do this here is some:
Archive encryption (7z)--->pretty good but you need to have 7z installed in some form to read the archive, Exposing your 7z installer to corruption and dose not exactly protect the flash drive just the files in the archive
Bitlocker--->The creator only comes with some versions of windows,reading is only backward compatible to windows XP-SP2,it dose protect the entire flash drive because it makes a Archive like filing system that spans the flash drive,but on any windows newer than XP, you are plagued with the same problems as hardware encryption
5.Dummying up free space
Their is plenty of ways to do this too
The basic idea is to write information onto the flash drive till their is no space left for anything
When a virus attacks it cannot add anything to the existing executable,or add new executable or even add a autorun.inf(be sure that your flash drive dose never contain a autorun.inf becuse a virus will delete it to add its own code)
This is not a 100% grantee as some viruses may delete files to gain assess to a flash drive
Here is the best project i could find:
http://code.google.c...sbdummyprotect/
Here is others too:
http://www.chillgeek...om-viruses.html
http://nod32-dummy-f....softpedia.com/
ThanX for reading and if you have other ways to protect your "precious" post them here