Przemysław Łukawski's blog

Nowadays many viruses and malware spread using portable media like pendrives, players or DVDs. This is possible thanks to the autorun feature which is in every Windows operating system (95 or newer). You can find a lot of guides in the internet telling how to disable the autorun in Windows. However I noticed, that in most cases the guides are not accurate – they do disable the autorun yet they don’t prevent the autorun.inf file from being analyzed by the system. Thanks to that, the system will not execute commands from autorun.inf file by itself but if you double click the removable disk icon, the system will execute the default command from autorun.inf file and thus install the malware.

Fortunately, I found a way to prevent the system from reading the autorun.inf file at all resulting in completely disabled autorun feature. It is done by creating a new key in the registry. The key that must be created is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf
with its default value set to:SYS:DoesNotExist

After creating mentioned key and restarting the shell by killing explorer.exe process, logging out or rebooting, the autorun feature in the whole system will be completely disabled allowing everyone to plug any portable devices without worrying about malware anymore.

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By default, only members of “Power Users” or “Administrators” groups can share folders or printers. Sometimes this is not enough – sometimes we want to allow specific users to have a possibility to share some folders but nothing more. Unfortunately there is no graphical tool in Windows XP or in any other version of Windows, which can give us a possibility to do that.

However, there is a great tool called “TweakUI” (created by Microsoft), which can change specific Access Lists in the registry, so we can give anyone we want the right to share folders or printers. To make this happen you must do the following steps:

1. Download and install TweakUI (you can get it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx)
2. Launch it and go to “Access Control” tab.
3. Now give the same rights for the users or groups you want to be able to share folders, like they are set for “Power  Users” in the following categories:
   • Manage file/print server connections
   • Manage file shares
   • Manage print shares
4. Apply the changes and reboot the system.

From now, the specified in step 3 users or groups will have the right to share folders. It is wise, to create a group called for example “Share Creators”, give it the mentioned earlier rights and put all the users we want to share folders into that group.

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