How to protect my PC against a guest's usb flash drives?
I am having a guest who would like to use my PC (Windows 10 Home). Recommend a solution how to protect my PC from potential malware threats from his USB flash drive.
Note I do not care at all if the guest catches any malware from my PC, that his problem to protect his drive.
I hope the guest would not intentionally run any software from his drive, yet he might need to access his documents.
So far I only disabled autoplay. I think I have an old Windows 8 laptop with installed "USB drive security" suite or something, I think I can lend it to the guest. After guest leaves, I will run antivirus or just backup important data and reinstall windows.
61 Answer
The good news is that Windows 10 will no longer let any software execute automatically from the USB whenever it is plugged in. This "feature" was also called Autorun.
The bad news is that if your friend executes any software from the USB, and that software is infected, it may also infect your own computer.
If you would prefer the computer to stay in its exact current state as from before your friend started working on it, you may use the new Windows Sandbox to place the computer into a state where all changes are discarded when going off this mode.
This would mean that your friend can work on files on his USB, may even copy them to hard disk, but will need to take it away with him on the USB. Once the Windows Sandbox is closed, this will undo whatever changes he did to Windows and the hard disk.
For more information, see the articles:
Third-party products in this area are:
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