Disable USB Autorun to Save PC from USB Viruses

Pen drives are very common these days. Everybody has them for their daily data transfer needs and since these are connected to different computers very often, they become a easy carrier of malicious codes (virus, trojans, spywares etc).

How viruses spread from USB/Thumb/Pen drive?

Whenever a USB drive is plugged into a infected computer, virus copies itself to the pen drive and sets it to execute itself when pen drive is accessed by making changes in the autorun.inf. Whenever pen drive is accessed, the autorun.inf calls the executable file of the virus upon which the system gets infected.

How to save your computer from viruses from USB/Thumb/Pen drive?

The most effective method of preventing your system from getting infected is to disable autorun feature of USB devices. DJ tells us about disabling autorun feature on[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] He tells us a method in which he uses gpedit.msc and disable autorun feature but the problem is that gpedit.msc is not available under Windows XP Home Edition.

So, I am going to explain how to disable USB autorun feature through registry editing which not only works for WinXP Home but also for any other edition of Windows.

UPDATE : There is a[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] feature too. You better use it. It works far much better than this registry h*a*c*k*.

Browse to the following key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Modify the value of NoDriveTypeAutoRun to ff (hexadecimal)[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Although I must warn you that playing with the registry can be harmful for your system and you might end up re-installing your OS. Before making any changes, I recommend reading[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]And if you don’t want to edit the registry then you can download this registry entry[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Download [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]Right Click > Save it on your computer > Run it on your computer.

Press Yes when it asks for confirmation for adding the entry into the registry.

This will now prevent any virus from auto executing itself through a USB drive. In addition to this, you must have a good anti virus installed on the system as this method just stops the virus from infecting the system automatically.

Playing with registries to disable autorun may not be that easy for most of the users, though the procedure has been explained in good detail but if u are naive and dont want to play with the registry entries, then u can use "Disable Autorun" feature provided by many anti viruses like Quickheal. Also make it a practice not to open ur drive by double clicking on it because if ur usb drive has an infected autorun.inf file, double clicking on the drive will execute the infected file and the worm will transfer into ur active memory and ur whole system will be infected., so better open ur usb drives from the dropdown menu at the address bar of windows, u can also use right click>Explore option, that way ur drive will be opened bypassing the infected autorun.inf file and hence ur system will not get infected. moreover use an upto date antivirus to stay safe.

thx bro