Can a Virus Be Transferred to External Drives?

A report in LabMice, a subsidiary division of TechTarget, says that social engineering techniques (email, chat, peer-to-peer networking) that involve saving files on external drives are responsible for the spread of nearly all new viruses.

You can set the external drive root folder attributes so that such files cannot transfer to the drive at all. A very common technique malware developers use for infecting external drives is to write an Autorun.inf file that executes malware instructions for delivering the payload the next time you plug the drive into any computer.

You can set your operating system so that it does not automatically play removable devices. In Windows operating systems, you can also prevent autoplay if you hold down the Shift key for several seconds when you plug in the external drive.

Viruses can transfer easily to and from the boot drives of any computer that does not have active antivirus scanning enabled. Do not plug an external drive into a computer that does not have an up to date antivirus program running.

Some viruses that can infect external drives are persistent, in that they resist removal and cleanup by restoring themselves automatically if deleted or rendering the removable drive completely unusable. In such cases, the best course of action is always to contact professional data recovery services who can recover your data.