USB viruses

hi there, i have a question about those annoying viruses on USB sticks:

Is there a way i can be infected from a virus on USB if i have previously disabled AUTOPLAY in gpedit.msc on all drives, and without having an antivirus software active? Or there are some new more advanced ones which infect your computer as soon as you plug USB in with or without autoplay turned off?

Thanks in advance!

 

Windows will read from the USB drive just because it's inserted even if autoplay is disabled because it wants to index the files on the drive so in theory a virus could be transferred if it were able to be resident in what would be called the File Allocation Table. I'm not aware of such a virus but I have to say that the possibility does exist.

 

Yes Halo, of course that can happen but i just wanted to know about self copying malware in USB sticks as soon as an usb is connected to a pc, without user's doing anything and definitely havent thought about that indexing thingie, i guess that would be some really badass hacking if someone can program such a malware which can infect you that way, but just in case is there a way to disable that indexing on just usb sticks, or without indexing you cant work with those files and such?

Thanks for your time!

 

The indexing of files is automatic, and without it, the device could not be searched. I think by default Windows does not index USB drives, however if you look in the control panel --> indexing options you should be able to control it.

As for the FAT virus, it is possible but unlikely. There would be no defence that I can think of except an active process scanner.