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Want to know what all type of malware infections are their that hides themselves in a pendrive completly and infects machine silently.How to detect this type of malware as they cannot be seen.

How to proceed for analysis.

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Typically you would use an anti-virus program to detect and prevent infections from external storage devices. This is only as good as the AV protection installed. A good, up to date AV can protect systems against the majority of infections, but there is plenty of malware that use unknown vulnerabilities which will not be stopped by any AV program. So there's no way to prevent all malware infections from portable storage.

The approach many companies take is to prevent external storage from being used in the first place, which is inconvenient to users, but prevents that threat vector.

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  • I am talking about what if AV cant detect hidden malware.As 4GB pendrive never shows full 4GB.It might be possible that some maleware is also present.So can we read the data of empty pendrive?
    – user162098
    Mar 8, 2013 at 14:09
  • An empty pendrive has no data, so how could you read it?
    – GdD
    Mar 8, 2013 at 14:10
  • It's not because the pendrive reports it's empty that it's actually completely empty :) Mar 8, 2013 at 14:11
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Unless your machine is already infected, a pen-drive should be able to be read if the virus is able to be run. There are tricks to make it harder to find, but a good A/V should still be able to find it hidden or at least find the hooks it uses to make sure it gets executed when installed.

A slightly safer option than simply plugging it in and hoping your A/V does it's job is to use a Linux Live CD, boot in to Linux and plug in the thumb drive there. Windows viruses are not going to work on a Linux install, so your computer would be safe as long as it doesn't have both a Windows AND a Linux virus on the same drive (which would be quite exceedingly rare as far as I know.)

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