Can anyone recommend a decent USB antivirus program?

Of course in an ideal world everyone's pc would be virus-free or at the very least have decent AV software installed but i'm getting fed up of having to format my 64gb usb pen drive regularly after getting viruses from other peoples laptops at work - i do backup my USB drive frequently nevertheless its a hassle copying everything back. So after a decent AV program which protects my USB drive - i know it still won't protect my data 100% but i guess some protection is better than no protection. Tried TrustPort USB AV but it seems to slow down my USB drive (3.0) considerably so on the lookout for alternatives. I'm not interested in cleaning other people's pc's (which many portable AV programs do) I just want to protect my own USB drive. My USB drive (Corsair) isn't U3 so can't use U3 apps.

It seems to me that you're asking too much.
What you want is a pen-stick protected from other peoples viruses - all well and good, just find a stick which doesn't allow anyone but you to write to it.
If others can write to it, then you'd have to have a way of cleaning their PCs before allowing any write to proceed.

The less arduous way is to automatically scan and delouse any external media which you connect to your PC(s). As a rider, you'd have to back up any material before letting anyone use one of your sticks on another PC.

In reply to a post by dandnsmith:

It seems to me that you're asking too much.

Not really, all i'm asking for is real-time protection for my USB drive and the only one i could find is Trustport's offering. I think i may have to accept the fact that any AV software designed for portable disks will slow down USB disks since it will treat every file being transferred as suspicious.

Edited by deleted (Thu 06-Dec-12 08:53:36)

In reply to a post by baby_frogmella:

Not really, all i'm asking for is real-time protection for my USB drive and the only one i could find is Trustport's offering. I think i may have to accept the fact that any AV software designed for portable disks will slow down USB disks since it will treat every file being transferred as suspicious.

But you need the real time scanner to run on your USB stick when it is in another PC - this requires the software to run on the other PC which you cannot control.

If you allow writes to the USB stick from an uncontrolled PC running a full Windows O/S then you are always open to malware.

The only real protection is to set it as read only or don't allow it back in your environment after let loose.

Your work environment seem distinctly dangerous - allowing USB storage devices to connect and it sounds like malware is rife? Dont put your USB stick into it!

Sounds very dodgy if your computers at work have viruses on them, I simply wouldn't trust putting your USB device into it. For all you know a virus is copying all the data from your USB stick and then uploading it to hackers over your companies internet connection! Could be keyloggers on there or anything. I would not do ANYTHING personal on your work computer if the privacy of it cannot be trusted.

Edited by Pipexer (Thu 06-Dec-12 21:16:33)

From what I can see that Trustport software only gives any protection if the person using the USB drive elects to run the software. If they just write files to the drive without first launching the software it offers no protection at all.

Perhaps consider a USB drive which has a physical "read only" switch on it. Sounds more trouble than its worth though in my opinion!