Best protection against dirty thumbdrives?

[ssummer]

In my line of work, I often have to plug other people's thumbdrives into my SP2 and I hate the thought of that (lots of viruses/trojans spread through this route). What's the best way to protect against "catching" anything? I was thinking of running an obscure UNIX OS under VMWare and mounting the device that way. Is that overkill or does it still leave me vulnerable?

For those that are going to suggest their favoritve antivirus program, are you that confident in your AV that you would plug in thumbdrives from multiple absolute strangers without fear?

And for those that are going to say "Don't plug other people's USB drives into your Surface!", unfortunately given my particular use case, that is just not an option.

Any other ideas?

 

[jnjroach]

Most A/V programs have the ability to scan external drives when plugged in....

 

[InkyRag]

I like Malwarebytes. I run it concurrently with Windows Defender. After inserting the drive from "This PC" you just right click on the drive and select "Scan with Malwarebytes"

 

[Arizona Willie]

You might consider having a < cheap> computer dedicated to do nothing but check people's hard drives for virii before you plug them into your GOOD machine. You could use an old one if you have one sitting around. Put a plain emplty formatted hard drive in, install Windows and your virus programs and nothing else. Then when someone hands you a thumb drive, stick it in the testing machine and check it out. I've heard there are virii that can automatically infect your machine when you plug the thumb drive in. Don't need to run anything. Don't know if that is true or not. But, if I was in your situation, I think I would want a dedicated machine for virus checking before allowing the thumb drives access to my good machine.

 

[ssummer]

You might consider having a < cheap> computer dedicated to do nothing but check people's hard drives for virii before you plug them into your GOOD machine. You could use an old one if you have one sitting around. Put a plain emplty formatted hard drive in, install Windows and your virus programs and nothing else. Then when someone hands you a thumb drive, stick it in the testing machine and check it out. I've heard there are virii that can automatically infect your machine when you plug the thumb drive in. Don't need to run anything. Don't know if that is true or not. But, if I was in your situation, I think I would want a dedicated machine for virus checking before allowing the thumb drives access to my good machine.

Unfortunately the times that I do need to plug dirty thumbdrives is when I am on the road (part of the reason I got the SP2). I have also heard about viruses that spread just by plugging them in...

 

[the_new_normal]

A guest account might help a little

 

[Ruffles]

A guest account might help a little

Yeah, I'd start with this. Make sure you are logged in as a limited user so that anything that is run from the drive won't have access to anything. Then, scan with your favorite AV package (I like McAfee's enterprise stuff). You might also be able to completely disable autorun functionality (How to disable the Autorun functionality in Windows)

 

[dl1234]

Both Kaspersky and Bitdefender will offer to scan them when inserted. I'm sure other AVs will too.