Can my USB mobile broadband stick get virused?
 

Is there any any known virus that can specifically target my internet stick and if so are there any extra security measures i can take to try and prevent this?
I use Avast for my realtime scanner and Malwarebytes for on demand.

My own connection here is currently via a Sony Ericsson MD300 USB broadband which like others of it's type also doubles as a flash drive, although with a 169MB total capacity it's not much use for storing movies on! :D

In this respect yes it can get infected and I've not yet found any USB specific security software which doesn't at some point cause a problem. I prefer to leave mine alone and just choose this drive for an extra scan or two. Programs like Panda Cloud, Malwarebytes and others offer this from a right click menu so it's very easy to scan it separately now and again. I've never found anything on it.

Thanks MC.

I found that when a USB drive was inserted into an infected drive with a rootkit, an extra file was placed on the drive, called autorun.inf

Removing that file did not affect the USB stick operation in any way.

So I guess if the drive is writeable, yes, a virus file can be written onto it. I know there is at least one app to deal with this kind of thing - for example by disabling autorun on any newly-inserted drive - so there are solutions. Or set the drive to read-only if this is possible?