Recently I’ve seen people having issues with certain devices attached via USB to their thinking machines… Issues that included, Spyware, Malware, Viruses.. ugh, many more.. Wouldn’t it be good to disable these unwanted creepy devices when on a shared/public windows  machines? Ok, follow these steps & get yourself a bit secured.

This can be implemented on your local Windows Machine or on the Windows Dedicated servers, please make sure to backup the Windows registry before following these steps. As making incorrect changes in Windows registry can make the system unbootable.

Search for the following keys in your registry to disable each of them respectively or as per your requirement.

SYSTEMCurrentControlSetServices

Notice the value ‘Start‘, this should be 3 by default [3 = enabled]. Switch this value to 4 [4 = disabled], and USB storage devices are disabled. To re-enable the device switch this value to 3.

To disable USB ports:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesUsbStor

To disable CD-ROM drive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicescdrom

To disable Floppy drive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesflpydisk

To disable a High Capacity Floppy Drive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicessfloppy

Once done, you’d need to reboot your machine for the changes to come into effect. That is it

Whenever you plug a USB drive in your system (which you think is infected by virus), do not open it -  Do not click ‘OK’ !
click on ‘Cancel’. Now open Command Prompt by typing ‘cmd‘ in run box.
Type dir /w/a and press enter.
Above command will display list of files in pen drive. Check in the list if the files are not

* Heap41a
* New Folder.exe
* Autorun.inf
* svchost.exe
* Ravmon.exe
* or any other exe file which may be suspicious.

If any of the above files are present in the list, then your USB drive is infected. To remove these files, type the following command in command prompt
attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter.
This will remove from files  Read Only, Archive, System and Hidden attributes .

The files which you will now be looking on are the junk files (viruses) and can be deleted using  del command. Delete all those files which you find suspicious. To be on a safer side, just scan again your  USB Pen drive using a anti virus to check whether it is free of virus or not.