A USB Disk Virus

My younger sister came to Beijing, and gave me her little USB disk. She said there was a virus. It was effected in the network in her office. There are a lot of viruses wandering on their network from computer to computer. Even they installed various virus killers, the situation remained unchanged.

I had no idea about USB viruses. Maybe this is the first time I was facing this kind of thing. I plugged the disk into the USB port of my notebook. I am not afraid of it because I have Norton Anti-Virus. After scaned, Norton reported there is a malware named iexplorer.exe under iexplorer directory. The virus tries to fool user it is a copy of the famous Internet Explorer!

How does it take action? When we click the icon of the removable disk in the window of My Computer, by default, autorun.inf on this disk is loaded and something will be executed. At this moment, the virus hides itself in memory waiting for the opportunity to copy itself to a new USB disk.

It is possible to disable the autorun feature by modifing some key values in the Registry of Windows. But it is not a wise idea. More often we need this feature. There is a best practice in using a USB disk or other removable devices. You can keep pressing the Shift key when you plug the disk. In this case autorun is skipped. And then, open your virus scanner. Remove autorun.inf. For a USB disk, you actually don't need it. Be cautious after you use your disk in other computers.