Thread: Easily preventing data theft via USB pen drives

Your employees at the workplace are copying data on USB pen drives and taking it home; this is a security lapse with legal liabilities. You want to prevent this, but how?

A registry entry puts a stop to write access for USB drives. For it to work in Windows XP, at least Service Pack 2 needs to be installed. Start the registry editor with 'Start I Run', 'regedit' and 'OK'. Under Vista, type 'regedit' in the search field in the start menu and press [Enter]. In both cases, you need to log in through a user account with administrator rights.

Open the 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System\CurrentControISet\Control\ Storage Device Policies' key in the tree structure of the editor. If this does not exist, create it with 'Edit | New |Key', Now right-click on the free space towards the right side of the window and select the 'New I DWORD value' or 'DWORD Value (32 bit)' context command, This time, overwrite the name suggested by Windows with 'Write Protect'. Open the new entry and set its value to '1' in the 'Edit DWORD Value (32 bit)' dialog box. Subsequently confirm these changes with 'OK' and exit the registry editor using 'File I Exit', Finally, restart the computer to activate the write protection function.

NOTE:

If you want to allow data to be copied to a USB drive in the future again, change the value of the 'Write Protect' key in the registry editor to '0'.