USB ports are (were) problematic for AV scanners because they had to figure out what type of device was connected, if it had any storage, if it made sense to scan it. Why run anti-virus stuff if someone could simply pop a thumb drive into a USB port and have it inject something into the computer without ever displaying something on the screen or tripping the anti-virus stuff? Some vendors added a setting into the BIOS to enable that, because it's a big effing security risk.
But it was still problematic to make them auto-run something when you plugged them in. When thumb drives hit the market, you couldn't even boot from them until vendors added that into the BIOS. It's a convention added to Windows to get CDs to auto-run a setup.exe when you inserted the disc into the drive, as opposed to booting from it. In BIOS, you can enable booting from CD, DVD or USB drive etc., but it has nothing to do with Autorun.inf.
In my opinion, Autorun.inf is just the ability of Windows to automatically start something from CD, DVD, USB etc. (This is where being a Windows programmer comes in handy!) That does not keep you from transferring files, it just makes it a bit more convoluted.
I've been in many places where their IT Dept literally disables the ability to mount any sort of external memory device via USB to their computers. A year or so later I happened to check back with the company and they were no longer selling those devices. I got some demo devices for testing and they worked as advertised, but that project ended up not proceeding.
Korea that made thumb drives that registered themselves with Windows as CD-ROM drives, thereby enabling the autorun.inf to be called. You had to go into the ROM-BIOS of the machine and enable a setting to run it, but I'm not sure that even exists any more.Īt one point, I was looking at something that did that predictably and found a company in Japan or S. It's actually a really hairy securitiy risk.
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