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Will this method help avoid pendrive viruses?

6 posts · originally from https://geek.digit.in/community/threads/will-this-method-help-avoid-pendrive-viruses.89244/

S
sakumar79 Original post #1
May 30, 2008 at 9:49 PM
Hi,
Occasionally at my dads office, he takes his pendrive for presentations... Though it has a write-protect lock, sometimes, inadvertantly, the lock gets removed and viruses infect the pendrive... Luckily, I am usually careful about this and so far I have not had too much trouble with it...
But I got to wonder if we can make a dummy autorun.inf that can be set as read-only to prevent viruses from hijacking the drive... Googling indicated that most viruses these days can easily turn off read-only attribute of the autorun and infect the drive.

Now, my thought is: Can I format the drive in NTFS and then set up a dummy autorun.inf which I then give security permissions for only the Administrator account in one of the office computers to write or read... Will this ensure safety of the pendrive elsewhere? If the infected computer has some admin login, will this measure fail? Please post your thoughts and any experience on the method....

Arun
dheeraj_kumar
May 30, 2008 at 10:15 PM
How about create a dummy autorun.inf. Type some text in there, just to have arnd 1 kb size. Then set the property as Read Only. That might work, I think.
S
May 30, 2008 at 10:26 PM
@dheeraj, see my post - it appears just having dummy autorun.inf with read-only post is of no use these days... That is why I thought perhaps if it was with NTFS partition and had security priviledges set, it might help...

Arun
dheeraj_kumar
May 30, 2008 at 10:30 PM
Ouch, sorry man didnt read it fully. You can always disable the autorun, but protecting it from being infected will be difficult...
nitish_mythology
May 31, 2008 at 9:04 AM
@sakumar79
I never thought of this.. Nice concept anyways.. Pls share it here if you find a way around it!
dheeraj_kumar
May 31, 2008 at 9:38 AM
*support.microsoft.com/kb/308419

^^ can this help in any way?

edit: this one too. *www.le.ac.uk/cc/dsss/docs/acls1.shtml