The Panda USB drive Prank

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Error : Partition labels showing “Local Disk” instead of assigned name.

Can´t find any solution to this problem other than reformatting the whole partition. But when you got 3 TB of data that takes quite some time.

If you plug into a public computer that has Panda USB vaccine installed this can ruin your partition in seconds: see example video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl03ZjBtx-U  

And Panda Security team says there´s no way to fix it.

So is it better to format with GPT instead of NTFS?

1 Like
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Hello,

Does that happens on any computer or just the one that you have the application installed?

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After that Panda USB vaccine has “vaccinated” your USB drives it put an invisible autorun.inf file in it NTFS - don´t know how. And your partition also looses its display label. The label can be read fx by diskpart but windows explorer just can´t make sense of it. So if you stick your USB into another windows, it´s the same problem.

If you google it you can see people asking about it and wonder. But as you can see it is the Panda USB vaccine that does it.

Just can´t get rid of it on those WD drives in the movie. They are big, so there´s no way to re-format. And it will any way be back when plugged into a public computer with Panda USB vaccine security

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Interesting post thanks. How about formatting the drive by writing zeroes to it? I think WD DLG does that.

Joe

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A quick format also removes it. Still you´ll have to backup and recover your data also. The point is that it only takes seconds for Panda USB vaccine to make its undoings to the NTFS while it takes you more than 16 hours to move around 1TB in order to format the drive. And even when you know there´s a risk by plugging into a public computer where some one might have setup Panda USB vaccine as security you still can´t do anything to protect your drive. Windows USB security is zero. Windows support just say “contact Panda…”, see link

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I did not understand the point of that overly-long video.

Could you please explain the issue more clearly? I googled for other discussions about it, and can find none.

If it’s just a matter of partitions losing their drive labels, can’t that be simply fixed in Windows Disk Management rather than having to format the entire drive?

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It causes this in Windows 7 and 8. I check in Windows XP and Linux and they show right drive label.

Still looking for a way to remove Panda’s autorun which is not visible even in show hidden/system files, Folder Options