 | By Mark Joseph Edwards USB ports offer great flexibility to let you easily add all sorts of new devices to your computer. But USB devices also pose a considerable risk, so this week I explain how you can secure your USB ports to prevent unwanted activity. |
How to prevent writing to USB devices
A computer’s USB port provides a great way to connect devices such as flash drives, cameras, and MP3 players. In fact, many cameras and MP3 players can be used as pseudo-flash drives, because their storage systems usually look like a regular drive in Windows. However, allowing write access to USB devices might not be a good idea — for two basic reasons.
First of all, if someone can write to a USB-based storage device, they can easily copy untold amounts of company data onto the device and trot right out the door without you knowing about it. Second, if malware makes it onto your computers, it could potentially write files to USB devices or erase such devices completely.
If you want to allow USB devices to be readable on your computers, but you don’t want to allow write access, there’s an easy way to do that by setting a Registry flag, as outlined in the steps below:
Step 1. Click Start, Run, enter regedit, and then press Enter to launch the Registry Editor.
Step 2. Navigate the Registry tree to:
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