AutoRun Antivirus Pro

AutoRun and AutoPlay are a couple of Windows features that work like this: when you plug in a portable device, the operating system automatically performs a certain action. Unfortunately, the bad guys have turned this feature into a means to infect your computer: malicious code is executed automatically when you plug in an infected portable device. AutoRun Antivirus Pro aims to protect against this sort of scenario by vaccinating portable devices and by disabling AutoRun.

A straightforward setup wizard will guide you through all the steps you need to take to install AutoRun Antivirus Pro on your PC. According to developer Michel Oliviera (Josh Cell is an alias), AutoRun Antivirus Pro is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. The application provides support for FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file systems.

There isn’t much to say about this application’s interface. There’s a dropdown menu at the top that you can use to select a drive, buttons to "vaccine" and "unvaccine" the drive are Cleary displayed front and center, the option to disable AutoRun is featured down in the lower left hand corner, and an option to "autovaccine new plugged devices" is also featured down in the left hand corner.

Using AutoRun Antivirus Pro is a very simple 3-step process:
Step 1 – plug in a removable device.
Step 2 – launch AutoRun Antivirus Pro and select the removable drive.
Step 3 – click on Vaccine and wait for the process to complete. Once it does, an Autorun.INF file will be stored on the portable device.

The thing is that Microsoft knows about this trick and modified the way that AutoRun works, disabling AutoRun for removable USB devices. What does that mean? Well, it means that AutoRun Antivirus Pro is basically useless! And since Microsoft changed AutoRun’s behavior back in 2009 and we’re in 2017, AutoRun Antivirus Pro has been useless for quite some time now.

The bottom line is this: AutoRun Antivirus Pro disables AutoRun and offers a vaccine for portable USB devices that might infect your PC. But since Microsoft already disabled AutoRun for USB devices, it’s basically useless.