USB AutoRun Viruses

[galahs]

I have just had an encounter with a USB Thumbdrive virus that is activated by the autorun feature in Windows.

The virus killvbs.vbs installs itself onto your computer after inserting an infected USB storage device when Windows tries to automatically run or open the device.

So a good safety measure to prevent these viruses is to TURN OFF the auto run feature in your version of wndows. A web search on the topic will tell you how.

To manually remove killvbs.vbs virus I had to:

1. Remove all thumb drives from the Computer and turn off autorun

2. Ctrl + Alt + Delete, Task Manager, Processes, wscript, End Process

3. Delete killvbs.vbs from the c:/windows/system32 folder

4. Delete killvbs.vbs and autorun.inf from all infected usb storage devices

5. Search for killvbs.vbs in the registry

--- If you have C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe,C:\WINDOWS\system32\wscript.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\killVBS.vbs --> modify the key and delete everything after the comma so it now reads C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe

--- delete all other registry keys that are found to contain killvbs.vbs

OR

Use a virus sacanner and keep it up-to-date and scan all USB storage devices you plug into it.