Month: October 2010

Categories
Solutions Windows

Protect your Thumb Drive from Viruses using a Simple Hack



One of the easiest ways for getting your system infected with viruses is by using infected thumbdrives.  Most viruses create a startup file with the name “autorun.inf” and in the file point to the location of the virus(within the drive) to be run automatically when the thumb drive is detected.

Most Antivirus programs detect these viruses but there is a simple hack that can be used to prevent these Autorun viruses from infecting your drive.

All you need to do is:

  1. Delete the “autorun.inf” file in the root folder of your thumb drive(if the file exists)
  2. Create a new folder with the name” autorun.inf” in the root folder of the thumb drive

How does this work?
Well most viruses create the autorun.inf file when the thumb drive is inserted, by creating a folder with the same name the virus cannot create the file. Also since its a folder its not straightforward to delete and replace it(thank you Fat32 filesystem)

Ps: This hack works with most common viruses but its still recomended that you have an updated antivirus program to faithfully protect your system against virus attacks.

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Categories
Linux

Determine Mounted Filesystem Types on Linux



In linux its very easy to lose track of filesytem types if you have been using it for a while. With the advent of ext4(and NTFS) systems its hard to guess which filesystem type is running on each partition.

One of the easiest ways to determine the filesystem type of a mounted filesystem is to use the mount command. The output of the command is of the type:

haas@techhacks:~$ mount
/dev/sdb8 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
none on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
none on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sdb6 on /media/Windows type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_permissions)
/dev/sdb9 on /home type ext4 (rw,commit=0)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sda1 on /media/ext type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal)



As you can see, second last column displays the file system type. For example first line [/dev/sdb8 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0)] can be read as follows:

  • /dev/sdb8 : Partition
  • / : File system
  • ext4 : File system type
  • (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) : Mount options
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