USB Drive Security Question

Shawz

Does anyone know of a way to only allow authorised USB pen drives to be used in pc and once connected automatically scan for viruses?

I know there are programs you can buy to do this sort of thing but the company I work for don't have any money to spend.

Any ideas or suggestions gratefully received

Little_John

Most antivirus software should automatically scan any drive that are added to a system, including usb pen drives.

As for restricting the use of pen drives I havnt done it myself a option to stop them being used other than disableing the usb ports but that has its downsides.
USB drives are usefull for reading files and I think that the best option is to remove write access to any USB storeage it can be done with a simple registry hack.

Go to regedit and the following location
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Create a new key called StorageDevicePolicies and create a REG_DWORD under it called WriteProtect and set the value to 1. This will prevent users from writing to USB drives. To allow writing to USB drives just change the value to 0.


If you want to stop them compleatly you could disable the USB storeage driver, it only stops new drives from being installed but is an option.
Open Registry Editor.

In Registry Editor, navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR
Locate the following value (DWORD):
Start
and give it a value of 4.
Close Registry Editor. You do not need to reboot the computer for changes to apply.
To re-enable the setting, go to the Reg Key above and give the Start Dword a value of 3

It is also possible to disable the USB drives with group policy editor on windows server if your company has this option I will search for the solution I found a while back
LJ