I have set autorun disabled on all my removable drives. I have to use my pendrive on a known infected computer at office, and i use it to carry material from my home comp to office. What i do is to format it always before opening on my home comp. So far it works, but is there a theoretical chance of getting virus by merely inserting the pendrive? (The obvious disadvtg in my method is that the pendrive can only be used oneway, it cant be used to carry material from other comps to mine)
(This question has been moved here from an earlier unrelated thread. The next two comments are carried forward from that thread.)
You have set autorun to disabled, there technically is nothing stopping other malware resetting those values, which is which is why I don’t see software/registry hacks as a 100% protection solution, also disabling autorun would also be a pain in the rear for some who actually want it to work where it should, for CD and DVD, removable media, what it was originally designed for.
Which is why I have tended to suggest Flash Disenfector, which creates a physical folder (on all HDD partitions) of the same name autorun.inf and it is protected from deletion, etc. It is this which also limits its spread as these autorun.inf files on your HDD partitions would run on boot, starting its malware, also infecting clean USBs that you insert.
Disabling autorun completely is a) the nuclear option so your regular CD/DVDs won’t start when you load them, b) easily reversible by malware, c) that article doesn’t even look at other options like flash disenfector or autorun eater, etc.
Its advantages could just as easily be on the disadvantages column as mentioned above in points a & b.