My cousins run stationery and recently have brought a Xerox cum printing machine. They also have a computer to connect pen drives of customers basically. system has been formatted multiple times because of virus attack. My main guess is that due to frequent connection of pen drives and hard disk the PC might be getting virus attacks. So, I want to help them. Can anybody list the precautions one can take to securely connect a pen drive to PC, safely browse the contents of pen drive and print them without harming their own computers?
Safest way to connect a virus affected Pen drive
A virus affected pen drive or hard disk or DVD can’t do anything with your PC if you are simply connect the device with your computer. When the problem occurs is when the virus affected Program starts to run or when you start to do copy the files from pen drive to computer. So what you can do to prevent the virus attack to your computer is to run an up-to-date antivirus scan of the drive once after you mounted it. The scanner will delete or at least quarantine the files that find, if it is virus affected. Scan again and it finds no virus, then you can copy the content your computer. Make sure that your anti-virus is up-to-date.
Second thing you can do is to turn of auto-run on all devices at least till you are cleaning the affected files. If auto-run is turn on, as soon as you insert the media, Windows looks for, and then executes the auto-run information on the media. That puts you at immediate risk if that media has been infected.
