securing a system from pendrive/flash drive virus

Today pendrives are becoming popular for their portability and high capacity.
As every coin has 2 sides we know that these devices are being used to spread virii rapidly as most of the viruses are targeted to the pendrives..

Active viruses infect your windows system as soon as you double click on the Pen Drive icon in your my computer. As virus always creates a autorun.inf file which is a system ,hidden and a read only file on your pen drive. It point to the main virus file which is also located on the pen drive. When user double clicks on the pen drive files pointed by the autorun.inf got executed which copies the virus files on your system.

tips to defend ourselves from pendrive viruses

Click Start

-->> click on Run or press windows key + r

* Enter GPEDIT.MSC press enter

* Double-click Computer Configuration to open submenu

* Double-click Administrative Templates to open submenu

* Double-click System to open submenu

* Double-click Turn autoplay off option which will be near the bottom of the list in
the right panel.

and u hav 2 tweak ur settings a bit to delete the pesky virus present in your pendrive

Open My Document> Tools> Folder Options>View or control panel folder options>view

click on Advanced Setting

Files and folders > Hidden files and folders

Enable the Show hidden files and folders

deselect hide extensions for known file types

now we are ready to rock

goto run or command prompt

type the drive name

eg: type g:\ in run

now ur pen drive will open up .

look for any files with doubles extensions such as hai.jpg.exe or

ps.bat or any files which u feel are doubtful

select all of them and press shift+delete



removing thru registry

1.New Folder.exe virus disables task manager, disables registry editor, disables folder options, and disables run option from start menu. Virus creates exe files like the icon of folders with the same name as the name of the folder, it also consumes more than 50 % of your processor usage so slows down your computer.



Let’s see how we can remove this virus without formatting the drive.


Fix:

In order to remove the newfolder.exe

You need delete a file named svichossst.exe where ever you find this file on your system



Remove the following keys from registry

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
“@”=[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
“Yahoo Messengger”=



[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
“Shell”=”Explorer.exe “




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when we autoplay cds there may e chance that our system gets infected
hence disabling cd-autorun from registry is the best bet to protect ourselves

copy the below code to a notepad and save it as any file but with .reg extension and after saving double click it

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CDRom]
"Autorun"="0"


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trick to defrag mutliple volumes in windows vista without using any third party software

By default windows vista provides a defragmentor which can defrag one drive at a time which ofcourse takes a lot of time.
Here is a trick to defrag mutliple drives in ur system at once.
To do this we hav to create a batch file to defragment all drives one after other.
the disk defrag utility can be invoked from the comand line with the following syntax:

Windows Disk Defragmenter
Copyright (c) 2001 Microsoft Corp. and Executive Software International, Inc.
Usage:

defrag [-a] [-f] [-v] [-?]

volume drive letter or mount point (d: or d:volmountpoint)
-a Analyze only
-f Force defragmentation even if free space is low
-v Verbose output
-? Display this help text

first of all we create a bat file by name tuneall.bat
and place it anywhere you like, as long as you'll remember where it is. If you want to run it from the command line, you could place it in the \windows directory so that it will be available in the system path.

For each hard drive, add a line to the batch file. For instance, if we want to defragment drives C: , D: , and F: we will add these three lines:

defrag c: -f defrag d: -f defrag f: -f

To run the defrag, just either double-click on the batch file or start it from the command

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