Safeguarding from infection through Pen Drives:

Aliens in pen drives rely upon autorun to affect your system. As soon as you insert an affected pen drive and double click on its icon in My Computer, be assured that your system is now infected. The best way (probably the only good way) to stop this is by disabling autorun. You can do this by manually editing the registry which is not always the best option. Instead, you could download TweakUI, released by Microsoft for tweaking the performance and related issues of Windows XP.

Using TweakUI (TweakUI is a PowerToy for Windows XP released by Microsoft):

• Download it from Microsoft Download Center and install it. Pretty straight forward installation and shouldn’t be any problem. Run it.
• Disable autoplay on all drives. (You may keep it on for your CD or DVD drives if you wish)

• This will disable autoplay for all drives and hence, when you insert the device, your PC will not be infected. But it is not over yet.
• As soon as you connect a device, always right click on its icon in My Computer and click on Open. Better yet, use Windows Explorer to view the contents. Enable option to view hidden files and folders.
• Delete the ‘autorun.inf’ file if present and any suspicious ‘.exe’ files if found.
• Your pen drive is now clean.

Follow these steps every time you use the pen drive. These steps are usually required if your anti-virus software fails to detect/resolve the threat.