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SanDisk accused of "Shades of Sony Rootkit"

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mwb1100:
Perhaps MS should issue a patch that stops AutoRun on all devices when you disable it for CDROMs etc.-Carol Haynes (June 23, 2006, 10:50 AM)
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YES!

To do this now requires mucking around with a myriad of settings that sometime affect CD-ROMs, but not other media or vice versa.  You need to get 3rd party tools or unsupported downloads from MS (PowerToys) to deal with it effectively.

Then, something always seems to come along and re-enable autorun.

The best way for a user to limit the vulnerability is to not run as administrator (as f0dder indicates), but that's easier said than done in the Windows world.

Ellycp:
The U3 stuff *is* still new to many people, so as the information gets more wide spread (and accurate) hopefully that will help prevent a lot of the problems.  I don't know, but it seems unlikely a U3 smart drive would be available for digital cameras- just sounds wrong to me.

Ellycp

jgpaiva:
Perhaps MS should issue a patch that stops AutoRun on all devices when you disable it for CDROMs etc.
-Carol Haynes (June 23, 2006, 10:50 AM)
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The thing is: there actually isn't any autoplay in flash drives. There's no place in windows to disable it, as windows shouldn't even support it.

I found out about that last week, because i was trying to make an autorun for my flash drive, and couldn't find any way to do this.
What enables this autorun on U3-enabled is the pen itself (how that works i don't know), but i believe this happens without windows being "conscient" about that, as it shouldn't even support that!

My opinion is that:

* The U3 flash drive should come with this functionality disabled, and could be activated after the first use.
* The autorun data should be visible when exploring the data on the flash drive.
.

Other than that, i think U3 is a good concept, and might get even better when thumb drives become even bigger.

mouser:
i was reading somewhere (forget where) that the way U3 drives work is they kind of simulate a cd rom, which windows will autoboot.

Tekzel:
The thing is: there actually isn't any autoplay in flash drives. There's no place in windows to disable it, as windows shouldn't even support it.-jgpaiva (June 23, 2006, 01:47 PM)
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Actually there is a little bit of misinformation in this thread :)  All removable media supports "autoplay", since it is a windows thing and not device specific.  No, "autorun" is a different thing, this is where automatically, through the file autorun.inf, a program is automatically run.  Windows only supports this on CDROM devices, thus the emulated cdrom on U3 sticks.  AutoPLAY is just windows saying "Hey, found a removable media that was just plugged in, what do you want to do?" and it presents you with the box that has items like explore and several programs you can run on the media based on what kind of data it finds on the media. 

I have a 2gb Memorex U3 stick that I have had a few weeks and really like it a lot, I have several portable apps installed on the U3 launchpad and I use them.  Not sure about Sandisk's implementation, but on my Memorex the only thing it ran by default was the Oddcast thing that tells you about it.  You can specify apps that will autorun from the launchpad by managing the apps and checking the box to autorun them, but by default all mine were disabled. 

Edit: Bleh, I even put the wrong autosomething in one place :)

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