Viruses from Pendrives.A way to stop them.

Everyone using the PC will sometime or the other face this situation.While most of the cautious people don't even dare to use a pen drive for data transfer, most of those who don't like to use flash drives will use them for sure.

The Windows Vista was not effected much by the viruses written for Windows XP, but however, The Vista is also now getting effected by many viruses which spread more through the pen drives.

A virus in the pen drive will start eating your PC as soon as it is plugged in because of the Autorun feature in Windows. You always see an autorun window as soon as the pen drive is plugged in. The pen drive has a root folder which contains all the data required for the autorun.The root folder will not be displayed in the files, but will be run as soon as you plug in the device. This is used as a vulnerability in spreading viruses and all the viruses will get into the root folder of pen drive which will be run automatically without any effort.So, disable the autorun using the following method.

Go to start>run (or press Windows button + R)

In the run dialog box type in gpedit.msc

The group policy of windows will open

navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Turn Off Autoplay
as shown in the figure below.

Now double click the Turn Off Auto play in the menu as shown above.

You will see the turn off autoplay properties as shown below.Enable it and select "all drives" for disabling the autoplay on all drives.
Click Apply and you have successfully turned off the autorun feature on all removable drives.

Don't think that your computer is safe from viruses entering from pen drives. Most of the pen drives will have an Autoplay action as the default for a double-click on the drive from My Computer.This is enough for all the viruses to enter your PC.

So,even after disabling the Autorun feature, do not click on the drive directly.Instead, use the Windows explorer which can be opened by pressing "Folders" in the toolbar above in My Computer or press Windows button + E to directly open it. Open the drive by clicking in the pane towards left in My Computer.

Still, you may fall victim to many viruses which have a folder icon,but are potentially good viruses that can duplicate themselves into all the drives.Before opening any file or folder,check its properties first and open it. A little care might save you from losing all your data to malicious viruses.