Hi all,

Today I would like to share my knowledge about most common problem pen drive carries. Yes it is a virus and we can easily tackle this problem by taking right precautions.

Here are some simple steps to tackle a situation where you have pen drive infected with virus and you are afraid to insert it into a clean PC. This works in a situation where your antivirus is not updated and does not have ability to tackle latest virus that may infect. This is a way to avoid infection from virus as we are stopping the virus from executing itself.

1. First of all, we should modify files and folders setting to show hidden files.
2. Now uncheck the "Hide extension for known files" option to show the extension of files, so that we can decide which type of we are dealing with.
3. Uncheck the ‘hide protected operating system files' option. This is because most of the virus scripts will be configured to hide and are created as system files.
4. Do not open the pen drive by double clicking on the "removable drive" icon, as the script will be written in such a way that the virus is executed by opening the drive by double clicking it. Even the "right click and open" option can execute virus, so alternatively you can open the drive by using the drop down menu from the address bar of your explorer.
5. After entering into the drive, delete the "autorun.inf" file if present, and delete files you suspect to be viruses that are not added by you, identifying them is easy as they will be having negligible file size (usually in kbs) and have extensions as .com, .bat, .exe.
6. At last, remove your pen drive and reconnect it.

Most of the viruses are .exe (executable files), .bat (batch files). They are set to execute using shell script which is written in "autorun.inf" present in infected pen drives. We can even see the shell script code by opening this "autorun.inf" file.

I hope this information will help in preventing a virus attack on your PC through the pen drive.