Disable autorun in Windows to prevent new USB boot virus infection

PC World recently published an article titled ‘How Windows Autorun Can Autoinfect’ that talked about the new USB based malware which is the new boot virus spreading from USB devices to Windows systems such as XP. The article stresses on the need for the IT admins to disable autorun in Windows to prevent such USB based viruses from infecting the systems on their network.

The problem is not just with the USB flashdisk drives but also those numerous USB based devices such as memory cards, USB hard drives and portable devices that Windows’ autorun features can detect and autoplay. To add more to the problem, when a user connects his/her device, the program contained on the disk is automatically run by the operating system. This is a big problem as IT admins have no control over their users as they can connect any device whenever they want to. To solve this problem, IT admins must disable autorun in Windows.

How to disable autorun in Windows?

The steps to disable autorun feature in Windows operating systems such as Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 are mentioned below.

Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
Locate and then click the following entry in the registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\NoDriveTypeAutorun
Right-click NoDriveTypeAutoRun, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 0xFF to disable all types of drives. Or, to selectively disable specific drives, use a different value as described in the “How to selectively disable specific Autorun features” section.
Click OK, and then exit Registry Editor.
Restart the computer.