How do I ban USB thumb Drives in XP

[live4spd]

Is there someway I use group policy to ban USB thumb drives? I dont' want users to have the ability to take home gb's of data without our IT department knowing about it.

Any ideas?

Ryan

 

[BigFatCow]

disable the usb ports?

 

[live4spd]

Thought about that but then all USB mice, and PDA's and that typ crap won't work. That would cause at uproar. 🙂

 

[SilentRunning]

How about denying access to removable storage?

Closest thing I could find pertaining to subject at the moment

Or here

 

[live4spd]

that's an idea.

Thanks!

Anybody else got any links?

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: SilentRunning
How about denying access to removable storage?

Closest thing I could find pertaining to subject at the moment

Or here

This would be the way to do it.

 

[Geforcer]

This should do the trick 🙂

http://support.microsoft.com/d...x?scid=kb;en-us;823732

 

[oog]

if you're going to allow PDAs, what's to stop them from putting flash cards in their PDAs and transferring the data that way?

 

[live4spd]

Nothing, that's a good point. It's a good think all my users have Palm instead of PocketPC.

 

[live4spd]

Originally posted by: Geforcer
This should do the trick 🙂

http://support.microsoft.com/d...x?scid=kb;en-us;823732

Thanks for the link. I think I'll give this a try, this will allow me to maintain some sort of control over what users can do.

 

[bsobel]

Thanks for the link. I think I'll give this a try, this will allow me to maintain some sort of control over what users can do.

If you can live with needing XP SP2, MS added the ability to make USB (actualy removable block devices) read only:

Setting Name: WriteProtect
Location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet
Control\StorageDevicePolicies
Default Value: DWORD=0
Possible Values: 0 - Disabled, 1 - Enabled

Bill

 

[addragyn]

Bump for a good tip.


Cringley just had an article on this.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040916.html

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: bsobel
If you can live with needing XP SP2, MS added the ability to make USB (actualy removable block devices) read only:

Setting Name: WriteProtect
Location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet
Control\StorageDevicePolicies
Default Value: DWORD=0
Possible Values: 0 - Disabled, 1 - Enabled

Bill

Useful tip noted - thanks!
Now if only most IDE HDs included an externally-accessable, standardized, write-protect jumper too. :|