autorun.inf and virusses/trojans on an USB stick

[sobriquet]

Hello.
Lately I've encountered some USB sticks that had a trojan or virus on
them and as soon
as they would be connected via USB, AVG would come up with a
notification of a harmful virus.
Apparently, there is an autorun.inf file on the stick that attempts to
execute harmful software as soon as the stick is connected via USB.
Does anyone know where I disable such behavior of automatically
execting files for USB media in XP and Vista to ensure that such
virusses can't install themselves when AVG is temporarily disabled for
some reason?

Kind regards and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek

 

[jen]

Hello.
Lately I've encountered some USB sticks that had a trojan or virus on
them and as soon
as they would be connected via USB, AVG would come up with a
notification of a harmful virus.
Apparently, there is an autorun.inf file on the stick that attempts to
execute harmful software as soon as the stick is connected via USB.
Does anyone know where I disable such behavior of automatically
execting files for USB media in XP and Vista to ensure that such
virusses can't install themselves when AVG is temporarily disabled for
some reason?
Kind regards and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek

See here:
US-CERT alert on autorun:
Microsoft Windows Does Not Disable AutoRun Properly
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA09-020A.html

-jen

 

[Dustin Cook]

Hello.
Lately I've encountered some USB sticks that had a trojan or virus on
them and as soon
as they would be connected via USB, AVG would come up with a
notification of a harmful virus.
Apparently, there is an autorun.inf file on the stick that attempts to
execute harmful software as soon as the stick is connected via USB.
Does anyone know where I disable such behavior of automatically
execting files for USB media in XP and Vista to ensure that such
virusses can't install themselves when AVG is temporarily disabled for
some reason?

Kind regards and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek

One suggestion comes to mind that actually works well... Download
sandboxie, configure a sandbox to handle all drives you don't want on
autorun. One sandbox can hold all of them just fine. Everytime an
autorun.inf is called from then on, whatever it does will be confined to
the sandbox.

Http://www.sandboxie.com

for more information. I do not work for sandboxie nor have anything to do
with the software except to say that I'm a very pleased registered user
of it.