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I read a report from Cnet about USB devices spreading Virus and I will quote:

The bad guys are intentionally developing new flavors of malware designed to propagate through USB devices,” said Gunter Ollmann, chief security strategist for IBM’s ISS security division. “They are today’s floppy drives.”

An infected computer can spread a virus to a clean USB thumb drive that is inserted. That USB drive will then be spreading the virus onto other computers if the operating system on those machines has an AutoRun-type feature enabled. The AutoRun function in Windows launches installers and other programs automatically when a flash drive or CD is inserted. The Mac has an equivalent function, according to Ollmann.

[Via Cnet]

In order to disable “autorun“, which in Vista is called Autoplay. In order to disable Autoplay from starting when you insert media into your computer here is how you do it:

You will need to be Logged in as Administrator before this can be done:

Next click start and type “Autoplay” without quotes. It will bring up a screen but all you have to worry about is this:

You will need to make sure there  is no check mark for “Use AutoPlay for all media and Devices”.   Click save and close.

Once that is done, you will have no more Autoruns from USB devices.  If you want to disable Autorun in XP, I’d suggest reading some of these articles for XP.

• Wikipedia – AutoRun
• How to Disable Autorun

These are just a few and are really nice to articles but there are others out there that might be more to your liking.  I suggest searching Google for them.   I hope this helps you out!!!

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 10:32 am and is filed under Autoplay, Autorun, Vista, WIndows, Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.