Panda USB Vaccine is a free utility from Panda Research which helps prevent malware infections due to the autorun feature of Windows Operating Systems. Once executed the user can choose two types of vaccinations: Computer Vaccination or USB Drive Vaccination. USB Vaccine allows users to vaccinate their PCs in order to disable autorun completely so that no program from any USB/CD/DVD drive (regardless of whether they have been previously vaccinated or not) can auto-execute. This is a really helpful feature as there is no user friendly and easy way of completely disabling autorun on a Windows PC. Panda USB Vaccine can be used on individual USB drives to disable its autorun.inf file in order to prevent malware infections from spreading automatically
Under Vista & XP, even if you disabled autorun your settings could be ignored under certain circumstances. Microsoft later fixed the issues with several updates. This didn't prevent USB worms to keep spreading as not everyone installs the updates (unfortunately). To put an end (hopefully) to this, Microsoft decided to change the autorun behavior for USB drives under Windows 7. Autorun in Win7 doesn't read the OPEN command from the autorun.inf file that USB worms use to execute themselves and infect your PC. But even under Win7 I still find this software useful as I have no need for autorun even for CDs/DVDs. Plus the USB drive Vaccination is a nice feature that can protect my USB sticks if I insert them into a XP machine. You still need to pay attention to suspicious executables but malware won't execute on its own.
