I’ve just encountered this issue for the second time so I thought it would make sense to pop something on here. If you’re traveling with some kind of USB key or card reader (maybe for your digital camera or to transfer documents to/from a laptop) get one with a write-protect tab on it.

All too often, cybercafe machines will get loaded with viruses. The one I’m sat on now tried to write to my key as soon as I plugged it in. I’ve put the same key – unprotected – into another machine in the past and been surprised to find a very small “version” of Internet Explorer on there when I got it back to my laptop. Surprise, surprise – when I scanned it it was indeed a virus.

As I type, I’m scanning the hard drive of this machine and every single .exe file (1916 of them so far) has the Worm/VB.BFF virus attached. I can’t get any information on this from anywhere, even AVG’s pages and they’re the vendors of the antivirus I’m scanning with.

The aforementiond AVG is a good product and one I use on my own laptop. It was already installed and up to date on this PC, but obviously nobody’s set it up to check files as soon as they’re brought down off the internet, nor to run a full scan at a set time of day. So there’s another lesson – just because the machine you’re sat at has antivirus on, don’t assume it’s safe.