July 10th, 2007

 Email This Post  Print This Post

A USB block storage device is an external (and generally portable) storage device that connects to your computer via a Universal Serial Bus port. They are becoming quite commonplace as of late. These devices include typical USB storage devices such as thumb drives, JumpDrives, and flash hard drives and some not-so-common ones such as iPods and digital cameras.

While these devices are great for transferring and transporting data easily, it is for that reason that they pose a huge security risk for corporations and organizations who are concerned with protecting valuable data. Because these devices are so easy to carry and use, they are being used more and more often in data theft cases.

For this reason, many corporations are now looking to restrict their use on computer systems and you may wish to do the same. Service Pack 2 for Windows XP addressed this issue directly with the addition of a registry value that will disable all write operations to block storage devices via USB adapters. To add this simply add or edit the following registry value.

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

If you are not comfortable making these changes manually, you can use one of the script files provided below.

DisableUSBWrite.vbs
DisableUSBWrite.reg
DisableUSBWrite.inf

Please use the trackback link when linking to this post.

Related Posts:

• Ternary Operators in VBScript
• The Complete EFS (Encrypted File System) Tutorial
• Speed Tweak: Disable Unnecessary Services
• Disabling User Account Control (UAC) in Vista
• Reset PS2 Parental Controls or Password

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Windows Administration, Windows Security, Windows XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.