How to avoid catching a virus on my pen drive when plugging it into a lot of computers? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Virus protection for flash drives

We know there is a lot of malware and viruses that stay on pen drives and attack the data or even the host machine data. To spread themselves, these kinds of viruses mostly infect pen drives when they are just plugged into a host machine, making users completely vulnerable if the host machine has no anti-virus program installed or is not up to date (most of internet cafés have this kind of problem).

So, I was wondering, is there a way to protect pen drives from pen drive based virus infections? I mean, is there something like an embedded antivirus software for mobile devices?

Answer 1

AFAIK there's no such thing.

You can set your USB read-only, but of course that way you cannot write anything to it either :D Encrypting the filesystem is another option, but unfortunately it requires special software on the end host which may not be available

Anyway, an AV obviously cannot run on a USB device while this one is unplugged, and when plugged you already have the host's AV. If you don't trust the end host, then don't plug your USB! One wise option to set for Windows users (which I assume you're) is disabling auto-run for USB, at least on your home computer, since this is in my experience the main way in which viruses spread.

Another option (best one IMHO) is to not use Windows, in which case you really don't care at all about those viruses.