http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:33:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/16/increase-usb-security-with-usb-cop/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/16/increase-usb-security-with-usb-cop/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:45:42 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10595 The Autorun feature is a big security risk on the Windows operating system. It is a risk even if you are the only person accessing the computer. Remember the Sony rootkit incident a while ago? Guess how Sony managed to install the rootkit on the computer system? Autorun can be disabled in Windows and this is probably the way to go for most users.

There is however another solution in the form of the USB security software USB Cop which has been uploaded to Sourceforge yesterday. USB Cop blocks all attempts to run an autorun.inf file on the computer system. It will instead display the contents of the file to the user giving a recommendation what the user should do with it.

Available options are to browse the contents of the disk or to close the dialog without performing an action. The interface itself will display all entries that are located in the autorun.inf file.

The option to execute the autorun.inf file normally is missing from the available options. What this application currently does is block all attempts of running an autorun.inf file on the computer system. The only difference between disabling that option in Windows and using the software is the ability to browse and see the contents of the autorun.inf file a bit faster and automatic with the software. In reality it would simply mean a few additional clicks for the same result without running a software in the background all the time.

The software itself uses about 4.5 Megabytes of computer memory while running.

Tags: autorun, autorun protection, autorun.inf, block autorun, disable autorun, usb, usb autorun, usb cop, usb security

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/16/increase-usb-security-with-usb-cop/feed/ 7 http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/05/usb-drive-letter-manager/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/05/usb-drive-letter-manager/#comments Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:48:07 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=6780 USB Drive Letter Manager is a software that can manage removable devices such as USB hard drives, flash drives or card readers that are connected to a computer. The software runs on any 32-bit and 64-bit Windows NT operating system since Windows 2000 including Windows Vista.

The USB Drive Letter Manager runs as a Windows service that solves the problem of drive letter assignments between usb devices, subst folders and network shares by automatically checking if the drive letter has been assigned to the latter before assigning a drive letter to a new USB device.

The software program can reserve letters so that they are not used by local drives, assign letters only from a list of default drive letters and specifically assign drive letters to USB devices by placing an ini file in the device’s root directory.

Another interesting feature of USB Drive Letter Manager is the ability to remove drive letters of card reader slots as long as no card is inserted. If you ever connected a multi-slot card reader to Windows you might have noticed that each slots receives its own drive letter by default which can be a lot depending on the number of different card slots on the reader.

By default USB Drive Letter Manager is only making sure that no network shares or subst folder letters get assigned to a newly connected USB device. Everything else is handled by the USBDLM.INI file. Additional parameters are described on the homepage of the software.

Tags: drive letter, drive letter manager, software, usb autorun, usb device, usb drive, usb drive letter, Windows

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/05/usb-drive-letter-manager/feed/ 2 http://www.ghacks.net/2006/10/15/autorun-from-usb/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/10/15/autorun-from-usb/#comments Sun, 15 Oct 2006 11:46:59 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/10/15/autorun-from-usb/ It is not possible to autorun applications from an USB stick in windows unless you already have a program started that watches the usb ports. APO usb autorun suite makes it pretty easy to use autorun informations on usb drives. The tool checks whether a connected usb drive contains autorun information, if it does those are executed.

The suite contains three programs, first usb autorun which checks the connected usb devices, second the autorun.inf builder which makes it easy to create autostarts and last but not least the autoruns starter which is able to display information when files are autostarted from the usb device.

The big question is if this is useful to at least some users and I think it is. It is not only possible to start executables using this method but also playlists, documents, html pages and everything else you can think of.

I’ve written an article some weeks ago about using true crypt to encrypt part of your mobile device so that no one would get access to those files without the program true crypt and the key that you specified when creating the container.

A good application would be to autostart true crypt from the usb drive to be able to decrypt the container with the important files.

Tags: automatically run usb, usb autorun, usb-autostart

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