Let me share with you a great article on Panda USB Vaccine!!

Posted by Ana Jun 26, 2009

I’ve recently read an excellent post by Pedro Bustamante in the Panda Research blog that I found most useful. Hope you like it!

Here you are a brief summary of the post. For a deeper understanding and to download the vaccine, click here.

The AUTORUN.INF file is a configuration file that is normally located in the root directory of removable media and contains, among other things, a reference to the icon that will be shown associated to the removable drive or volume, a description of its content and also the possibility to define a program which should be executed automatically when the unit is mounted.  The problem is that this AUTORUN.INF file feature, widely critizised by the security community, is used by malware in order to spread by infecting as soon as a new drive is inserted in a computer.

The malware achieves this by copying a malicious executable in the drive and modifying the AUTORUN.INF file so that Windows opens the malicious file silently as soon as the drive is mounted. The most recent examples of this are the W32/Sality, W32/Virutas and also the W32/Conficker worm which, in addition to spreading via a vulnerability and network shares, also spreads via USB drives.

Due to the large amount of malware-related problems associated with Microsoft AutoRun we have created a free utility for our user community called Panda USB Vaccine.

Computer Vaccination

The free Panda USB Vaccine allows users to vaccinate their PCs in order to disable AutoRun completely so that no program from any USB/CD/DVD drive (regardless of whether they have been previously vaccinated or not) can auto-execute. This is a really helpful feature as there is no user friendly and easy way of completely disabling AutoRun on a Windows PC.