No matter how advanced or experienced computer user you are, if you’re a person that very frequently connect and disconnecting USB flash drive on your computer, one fine day you’ll be less careful and the nasty virus will infect your computer using the autorun.inf method.
Previously I’ve shared with you a tool called USB Firewall that can protect your Windows by notifying you whenever a USB flash drive that contains an autorun.inf file has been plugged in. It works pretty well and doesn’t require any signature but the only con is it is not smart enough to detect whether the autorun.inf is malicious or not. You have to judge it yourself by viewing the autorun.inf file and then taking the necessary action to either delete the file or cancel the warning window. This tool is more for advance users.
If you’re a computer newbie, or even an advance user, you can try this free antivirus designed to only protect your computer from virus, worms or trojan which usually spread from external USB flash drives to your computer.
Mx One is an antivirus designed to effectively protect your computer and the devices of external storage such as USB flash drives (also known as pendrives), iPod, mp3/mp4 players, SD, microSD, and many other memory cards from computer virus infection. The program’s interface is very simple and you can easily scan, update, quarantine or send a virus sample by clicking the button. Sending a sample of a virus will need to be done from the browser and not directly from the program.
Mx One Antivirus takes up only 3MB of memory and I don’t feel any lag in my system with it running in background. This tool is compatible and can be ran side by side with any antivirus such as Nod32, Kaspersky, BitDefender, AVG, Pandata and etc that provides real time protection.
I tried plugging in my USB flash drive with a non malicious autorun.inf file, Mx One immediately scans the USB flash drive and reports that it did not find any virus or threat.
Mx One antivirus also has the ability to automatically update the virus definition signature file. From Mx One’s blog site, it showed that the definition is updated nearly everyday. Two things that can be improved in this tool is the ability to recognize whether the user has the latest signature file or not and scanning window automatically closes itself if no threat detected after the scan. I find it troublesome to click the close button each time I plug in an external storage drive.
Related posts: