When you consider security, protection of the network, protection of corporate data, or similar issues like this on your corporate network, you must think about how to control USB thumb drives and hard drives. If a user can take the USB drive out of the office in their pocket, copy nearly any file to it, then plug it into their production desktop to copy or execute the files from the USB drive, the exposure for an attack or introduction of a virus is rather extreme. Until now the control of USB drives has been limited, clumsy, and in most cases all USB devices are affected if you want to control USB drives. However, Microsoft has come to the rescue by adding Device Installation Restrictions to control USB devices on Windows Vista. These settings are easy to configure, control, and are very powerful as they are deployed using Group Policy.
|