Dealing with Auto-Play Viruses

Let me give you a little background of what are these Auto-Play viruses. Have you noticed when you have tried putting a CD installer or an audio CD inside your CD-ROM drive and you right-clicked on the drive’s icon, you may see an Auto-play command on top of the popup menu instead of the regular Open command? Observe that when you double-clicked on your CD-Drive icon, the installer that’s inside your CD would eventually run or your music software such as Windows Media Player would simply popup on screen in the case that you have inserted an audio CD. In simple words, when you double-clicked a removable drive’s icon that has media inserted like a CD or a thumb drive, and which it contains programs that are executable or audio files that are playable, they automatically get executed or opened on your Windows. Well, that’s the same mechanism used by Auto-play viruses to help spread themselves to different hosts and their common targets are the popular thumb-drives. Most users are already building the instincts of double-clicking or triple-clicking everything they see on their desktops and when they do, Auto-play viruses will surely arise! That’s really funny.

Now, what is this tiny stuff made up of? Usually Auto-Play viruses are small programs written in Visual Basic script or other geeky programming stuff, and these files usually have .vbs extensions. These viruses have different species and behaviors; some would just replicate themselves into the files and folders of your thumb-drive. Others would copy themselves to your hard disks and worse to your operating system’s sensitive folders and also they have the ability to detect if a thumb-drive has been plugged into your PC and the virus will usually infect and make the thumb-drive as their host. Just like the real viruses.

The question now is how to deal with them? How can we avoid them? Well, the best advice for the average computer users is, if you want to see the files on your thumb-drives, simply, Right-click first on the drive’s icon and chooses Explore instead. That way, in case there are viruses hiding inside your thumb-drives, they won’t get executed since they usually rely on the double-click events initiated by users. Trust me, I had so many encounters and tested that simple method technically and it helped a lot in avoiding thumb-drive viruses. Practice it everyday, Right-Click and then choose Explore, make it a habit and you have nothing to lose.

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Arthur Wayne has been writing articles for computer security fundamentals focusing on computer viruses. He can be reached at www.worldofcompendium.com’>World of Compendium

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