Since the appearance of USB external storage devices, these pieces of equipment have increasingly become the likely means of malware transmission. Many viruses and Trojans use the device autorun options to infect your computer, and many of them are quite aggressive. Standard antivirus programs commonly fail to detect USB-transmitted malware, so you may need to complement these applications with more specific software intended to find, block or disable viruses.
USB-AV comes to supply this need. It is an application that I have been using for a while, and has succeeded in detecting threats from infected pendrives. The application works in the system tray, almost invisible to the user except when you insert an external drive. The working mechanism is quite simple yet effective. The program’s size is quite small and it uses little memory footprint. What is more, the software automatically reduces its use of resources when they are needed by other applications or the operating system, so that the overall performance is not affected.
As far as the general settings go, the program offers to enable USB protection, and as an additional measure you may also set a password. You can additionally decide what to do in case a threat is detected. Moreover, you can decide how the software integrates with the operating system.
The application uses several “tricks” to detect threats, like detecting files called in the autorun file, executable files with name of known viruses, shortcuts to programs, hidden executable files in drives root and files duplicated in the root and inside folders. An interesting solution is the option of using a vaccine, which consists of an autorun protection folder that prevents viruses from creating autorun files. In addition, you can disable you system’s autorun option.
The software is also compatible with other antivirus applications, which means that allows the antiviruses installed in your system to silently scan the units that USB-AV is checking as part of its analysis process. Finally, US-AV updates automatically from an Internet connection, helping to keep your computer safe from even the most recent threats.
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