Secure your USB drives in Windows with USB Disk Manager
USB flash drives can unfortunately in some cases spread malware to your computer if kept unsecure. USB Disk Manager is a small Windows program that allows you to adjust the permissions of your USB drive to prevent the spread of malware. This Portable Application doesn’t need to be installed and can run directly from a folder on your USB drive or Hard Disk Drive.
Flash drives are great for storing files and for transferring data between computers. Unfortunately however, this convenience also makes these devices susceptible to malware infections. If you’re very familiar with the Windows Registry or know exactly how to setup Group Policies on your PC, then you can secure your USB drives all on your own. But if you don’t, or would like to go about it in a much simpler, faster way, then you should try using the USB Disk Manager.
USB Disk Manager is a lightweight, straight forward Windows utility program that allows to you to use your USB drives in a more secure way. A more common way to catch a software virus infection on your computer nowadays is through the use of USB drives. Some viruses can remain dormant on your drive, waiting until your plug it into a PC and then will automatically copy itself to and from the USB drive to the host computer.
The USB Disk Manager program helps you avoid this unfortunate situation by channeling writes through its filters and disabling the virus execution directly from the USB drive to avoid the automatic copy and spread of the malware from your portable devices to your host machine.
In this article, we’ll show you how USB Disk Manager can:
- Make your USB drive secure by write protecting it
- Make your operating system secure by denying execution access from storage devices
- Disable all your USB drives to block read and write on all portable storage devices
Once you download and launch the USB Disk Manager program, you will see these four actions in the left panel of the window:
Write Protect
Activating Write Protect blocks any new data from being written onto your portable storages devices, including portable hard drives, smartphones, and flash drives. This is the best way to keep any viruses that might be on your Pc from attaching itself to your portable storage device. It can also keep other people from transferring files off of your computer, which could be useful if you’re getting your laptop repaired and want to keep repair techs from copying your data. If you’re laptop is stolen, same deal.
Execute Deny
Turning Execute Deny on prevents executables on USB flash drive from running on your computer, will can prevent the more common viruses and malware from infecting your operating system.
Disable USB
The Disable USB feature will block your computer from reading or writing on USB flash drive devices. Flash drives won’t even show up on the control panel when you plug them in. If you want to prevent other people from copying or transferring files onto your PC, this is the best setting to have activated.
Settings
The final option in the USB Disk Manager left panel is Settings. This option lets you turn on some of USB Disk Manager’s additional settings, like automatically launching the program whenever Microsoft Windows boots up or disabling Windows Autorun for flash drives.
That’s everything! Remember that if you already have a USB drive plugged into a USB port when you run USB Disk Manager, your changes won’t have any effect until the device is unplugged and then reconnected.
