Manage USB Devices on Windows Hosts

Raven is a Miniature Schnauzer that doesn’t like small critters in the yard unless they can fly. This gives Raven an insurmountable challenge, since my wife is such an avid gardener. We live on the side of a hill and at the top of the backyard is a manmade bog which feeds a downhill river to a to a pond with trees and flowers everywhere. Along with this are bird feeders and some birds love to scatter the feed from the feeders to the ground. So, our back yard is a perfect setting to get a lot of squirrels', chipmunks, etc… When we go out the back door to the yard, Raven races out trying to catch up with the critters, but she just isn’t fast enough, and all the animals disperse quickly.

This chaos makes me think about some enterprise admins who are concerned about having to control the dispersion of enterprise data being stored on unapproved USB devices. The expectation that users are to only use USB data storage devices that are approved by corporate guidelines, without built-in security controls, is a task admins will never be able to achieve. This expectation is similar to the position of Raven ever catching a squirrel out back, it just won't happen. Someone will forget a device, or they just don't appreciate the governance definition and will plug in any storage device they have access to. Even though there are many stories on the internet that talk about attackers loading USB storage devices with malware and intentionally placing them into a location that a target victim will find. The victim then connects the USB device into their workstations and unknowingly gets compromised.

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