IAM Flash Shield - Active Protection Against Removable Drive Viruses

Recently, I released a cleanup program for viruses that spread itself through USB Flash Drives. At the moment, it only has 2 signatures – the 2 variants of the Aikelyu virus. I would add more when I get my hands on more specimens.

I am a bit surprised how widespread these infections are. I would attribute that to the increasing popularity USB Flash Drives and how easily new variants and imitations can be created. Anti-virus companies will definitely have a hard time catching up. As a matter of fact, some popular anti-viruses still can’t detect some of them. Or maybe, they just choose to ignore them. These viruses after all are more of an annoyance rather than a threat to data integrity.

I am a firm believer of the saying “Prevention is better than cure.” Rather than having the most comprehensive cleaner for every single flash drive virus out there, it’s better not get yourself infected at all. The preventive steps to manually detect and delete these viruses are simple. However, over time they can be drag.

And so, I spent the weekend building a simple utility to detect viruses lurking in your usb flash drive. It’s usually just there waiting to be activated when you use autoplay or by double clicking the drive’s shortcut in My Computer. It is an indiscriminate scan. Whenever autorun.inf points to a script or executable, it will prompt you if you recognize the script or the program. If you don’t recognize it, clicking yes would delete it. If it doesn’t find any it will prompt you that it didn’t so you can safely start using your removable drive.

There’s only a few hours of work built into this utility so don’t expect amazing stuff. But it does the job. Scans are done on program startup and every time you insert a removable drive in the computer. During first run, it will also lodge itself on the startup programs list so that it gets activated every time you log in to our computer.

In the future, I will add more functionality by integrating IAM Flash Clean. Maybe an auto updater. Or maybe you can make suggestions in the comments below. Hopefully, I have enough free time to do all that.

I called it IAM Flash Shield. You may download this active resident protection against removable usb flash drive viruses here.