It is become more and more common to be infected by autorun virus. It is not your antivirus is not up to date or your antivirus is not powerful enough, but yet your computer will be infected by autorun virus. Autorun virus is the virus that will infect your pc by using a file named 'autorun.inf'.This file is a common file that we use in removable drive such as pen drive and cd-rom to tell the operating system which executable should be call when this media is detected.Inside 'autorun.inf', it stated the executable name and the ico name that should be call during media detection. Hence, this file was misused to infect virus into computer and it is very hard for antivirus to prevent it because before the antivirus was able to scan the removable disk, our autorun mechanism in operation system had already executed the executable file stated in the 'autorun.inf'.
The symptoms of this virus was as following when your computer was infected.
- When you use your window explorer and double click on your hard disk, it prompted out select program to open the file. Due to the modification on 'autorun.inf', window explorer will not able to detect your drive. Hence, you cannot access your file in your drive. In this case, if you want to access your file in certain drive such as D Drive, you can go to start > run and then key in D: and press enter.
- Your window explorer will always in 'Do not show hidden files and folders' mode. Even you go to Window Explorer > Tools > Folder Options > View Tab and change the Hidden files and folders option from 'Do not show hidden files and folders' to 'Show hidden files and folders', after you click ok to apply the changes, when you open the same folder options again, you will file that the radio button still check on 'Do not show hidden files and folders'.Even you go to window registry to change the hidden files and folders option, you will still get the same result. This is the mechanism that this autorun virus used to protect itself from deletion as the 'autorun.inf' and the executable files will always in hidden mode.In this case, you are not able to view the file on window explorer since it is always in hidden mode and you will not able to change window explorer to show hidden files and folders.
Prevention is always better than cure and the best way to prevent this kind of virus is as following.
- For all your drive, create a folder named 'autorun.inf'. This virus need creation of autorun.inf to infect your computer.Without 'autorun.inf', the virus has no way to trigger your pc to run the infected executable file by itself.
For all the removable drive and your harddisk, create a folder named 'autorun.inf' to prevent creation of autorun.inf from the autorun virus.In window, you are not able to create a file that has same name with the folder. After you create the folder, you can try to create a text file with name 'autorun.inf' but it will not successful.
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
