Protecting a flash drive from viruses

uean

So Im in a virus rich environment and almost every computer around me is infected right now. More and more of these viruses are slipping under our virus software's noses. The big killer is flash sticks... guys going to internet cafe's in the city, using their flash drives, coming back and spreading the e-AIDS all over the place.

Are there any good programs out there to protect a flash drive from getting infected when plugged into an infected computer? Some way to encrypt the drive, write protect it from any unauthorized source, sandbox the thing, or what? I've stumbled across creating an autorun.inf folder (to prevent autorun.inf file creation) which is fine, but only prevents viruses from coming back and infecting a computer, not actually preventing the stick from getting infected in the first place. I've found a solution for write protecting the flash drive, but that seems a bit stupid as the minute you take off write protection to put some files on it from an internet cafe, everything will likely flood in. Dummy files to fill spare space is an idea except then you are stuck with a drive that is read-only as well.

Any solutions?

Allatar

I started using this to protect my flash drive and so far it has worked great.

Jubal77

That is a cool idea. I just scan my flash drive once a week and the AV solution we have at work has a good On Access Scanner that seems to catch usb problems.

uean

Jubal77 wrote: »

That is a cool idea. I just scan my flash drive once a week and the AV solution we have at work has a good On Access Scanner that seems to catch usb problems.

Yeah, most can be caught, some can not, and I'd rather rely on prevention-of-infection rather than detection if at all possible.

0blique

I would turn off autorun, since that's the most typical method these kinds of virus propagates. To me, leaving it on is just a disaster waiting to happen.