Usb Drive Security Help

Looking to disinfect any possible viruses or malware on old usb drives. I don't think they are autoplay but I want to disable that.

After disinfecting, I want to lock the usb drive so that not everyone can write to the drive unless I give specific permission.

 

For the first part: Grab a linux live CD (any will do - Parted magic is small and has ClamAV bundled) boot from that and then plug in the drive. Scan if desired/wipe if not.

I would recommend wiping the entire drive to be safe - but I am also paranoid about malware so there that too.

The second part - You could do this by burning the flash drive as a CDFS partition. I believe there are tools that can do this. A user can still format though. I don't know any hardware mechanism to prevent writing.

 

I have parted magic, how do you completely wipe the drive...what utility do you use?

 

On parted I use shred.

WARNING: MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT DEVICE!!!

1. Open parted and select your flash drive - it should be something like /dev/sdX where 'X' is a letter. Verify this is correct by the size of the drive and be sure it's not your computer's hard drive.

2. Open terminal and type the following replacing 'X' with the letter from step 1:

Code:

sudo shred -n1 -v -x /dev/sdX

Or if you are slightly less paranoid just use parted to delete the partition of the USB drive and create a New FAT32/NTFS partition.