Well, kinda.

Yesterday morning Microsoft through their MSRC announced that they were going to further protection of Windows customers by disabling the Auto-Run "feature" in Windows for everything *except* optical media.  (Because CD-ROM's can't be written to, according to them.  I see nothing about CD-R and CD-RW specifically.)

I feel this is a good idea.  There have always been virus/malware that liked to attach itself to things like thumbdrives and removable media like diskettes.  (Does anyone use those anymore? ;)  All the Windows environments that I've ever functioned in my whole career have always had Auto-Run disabled, so this is just good security practice by now.

For more details check out Microsoft's articles on the subject here and here.

Thanks to the reader who wrote in about this.

Update:  Had a reader write in asking how to disable Auto-Run on <Win 7 machines.  I "Googled" it (I haven't done this in years) and found this:

http://features.engadget.com/2004/06/29/how-to-tuesday-disable-autorun-on-windows/

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/04/28/changes-in-windows-to-meet-changes-in-threat-landscape.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715/

-- Joel Esler | http://www.joelesler.net | http://twitter.com/joelesler