USB plug and play devices are the easiest to use. They are also the easiest method to infect computers. There are plenty of tools available in the market that claim protection against USB infections. In this article on how to protect flash drive from Virus, we’ll talk about Phrozensoft Safe USB Tool – from the developers of Phrozensoft Mirage Anti-Bot – and some tips for better protection. Remember that there is no such thing as 100% protection when it comes to computing – offline or online.
Protect USB Flash Drive from Viruses
Role of AntiMalware & Auto Play
The first, foremost and most important tool to protect your computers from being infected by USB drives or anything else is your antivirus. There are dozens of ways to protect your computers from being infected. There are innumerable methods to infect the same, with the number of methods increasing each day.
Though there are third party tools, you need an anti-malware that gives you good protection. Your antivirus should be able to scan USB ports as soon as any drive is plugged. It means, it should be offering you real time protection on all entry points of the computers that we call ports. They include emails and downloads as well.
Coming back to USB Flash drives, Microsoft Security Essentials and a good number of other anti-malware offer USB content checking before allowing access. The only problem is that some antimalware are good enough to detect newer versions of malware, while some can’t detect – and this is where your computer gets infected. There is no 100% antimalware, so select one that best detects malware, doesn’t hog resources and is within your budget.
PhrozenSoft Safe USB
This is one of the many tools that answer how to protect your flash drive from virus. Again, I won’t claim it is 100% efficient. That helps in reducing in malware infection by a good margin. To understand how it will help stop virus infection, let’s take a look at how virus gets into your computer via Flash drives.
At your place, you formatted the Flash Drive and added some files to it. Then for some reason, you have to plug it into someone else’s computer. If that computer is infected, the malware would detect the new drive and replicate to it. It means that in addition to whatever you were doing on the different computer, a “write operation” is also being performed where the malware is replicating. If you stop this “write operation”, the virus cannot copy itself to the USB Flash drive. Thus, when you make USB Drives read only, you are literally stopping any unwanted “write operation” to that drive.
The method, however, fails if you need to copy files from an infected computer to your drive. It is in such cases where your antivirus has to intervene. To make it further secure, turn off AutoPlay in Windows so that your computer does not automatically open the USB drives as soon as they are plugged in. Then you can run an antivirus test on the drive to see if it is clean.
When you install Phrozensoft Safe USB, it sits in your system tray. You can right click it and make your USB drives read-only. You can also disable USB if you want though I don’t see any reason to disable it. Probably, the option is for small businesses who want to block USB.
The best part is that you can add a password to Phrozensoft so that users cannot enable USB or USB’s write mode. That way, your data too is safe as users cannot copy it to USB Flash drives.
To download Phrozensoft Mirage Anti-Bot, please click here.
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