Recently someone asked me: How can I clean a virus from my thumb drive and how can I protect it in the future?

You don’t need any special tools to do either of these things. You need a good antivirus program, some virus/spyware removal tools, a little time, patience and common sense.

If you have a good antivirus software on your computer and it is up to date, it will detect viruses and spyware on your thumb drive when you plug it in. If nothing is detected but you are still suspicious, manually run a scan on that drive just as you would on your C drive.

Three good applications for detecting, preventing and removing viruses, spyware and trojans are: Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad Aware and Malware Bytes. All are free or have free versions. Download, install and then one by one use them to scan your system and include your thumb drive. Alternately you can scan just the thumb drive. This may take some time depending on how much data you have. Spybot Search and Destroy will run in the background and constantly monitor your system if you configure it to do so on install. It will give you a pop up to confirm or deny changes to your system registry and files. Set it to ‘remember’ your answer for common applications.

Now some common sense advice!

Be careful where you download FROM. Not only from porn sites, warez, torrent and crack sites but free games or screensavers are often the culprit, this is typically what I see in households with children. They download free stuff not knowing they are infecting the computer. One easy way to prevent this is to create a restricted user account on your computer. Restricted accounts will not have permission to install software. Instruct your kids to log on with this account and password protect your administrator or power user account!

Be careful where you stick it! Your thumb drive that is. Be selective about putting your thumb drive in other people’s computers. Much like an STD you never know when you will pick up a nasty virus.

If you have a usb external hard drive that you often use to clean systems or share from, you can write protect the drive. I’m not sure if this will work with thumb drives.

Beware of buying thumb drives on eBay! Thumb drives coming out of China are NOTORIOUS for being loaded with viruses and/or spyware.

While this question was specifically about thumb drives, it is also applicable for external USB hard drives.

U.S. Army Bans USB drives