How to prevent USB memory devices from being used through Group Policy

USB devices have made transporting data extremely fast and easy. The down side is that they also have the potential of spreading computer viruses just as fast and easy. For this reason, you may want to restrict a computers ability to read data and execute programs from a USB drive. Also potentially damaging is the ability for a user to remove large amounts of data for your networks. You may also want to restrict the writing of data to these drives. Group Policy provides you with options to help manage USB memory device usage.

This first option is for users of Vista. You can scope this one to either a computer or to a user. In your GPO, expand. Policies \ Administrative Templates \ System \ Removable Storage Access. There you will find 4 GPO settings to help you deny read, write, and execution from USB devices.

For Windows 7 clients, you can also set a condition based on Windows BitLocker. In your Group Policy, expand Computer Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Bitlocker Drive Encryption \ Removable Data Drives. Two GPO settings will help you out here. First, disable Control use of Bitlocker removable drives. This will prevent users from BitLocker protecting their USB devices to get around the next setting we are going to enable. Second, enable Deny write access to removable drives not protected by BitLocker. Also check Do not allow write access to devices configured in another organization. This will not completely block the USB device, but it will only allow USB BitLocker devices created previously by the client to be used.

For Windows XP client, check this blog post from Daniel Petri on a possible method to help with XP clients.

Comments

Adding a Comment to a GPO with PowerShell

As I'm writing this article, I'm also writing a customization for a PowerShell course I'm teaching next week in Phoenix. This customization deals with Group Policy and PowerShell. For those of you who attend my classes may already know this, but I sit their and try to ask the questions to myself that others may ask as I present the material. I finished up my customization a few hours ago and then I realized that I did not add in how to put a comment on a GPO. This is a feature that many Group Policy Administrators may not be aware of. This past summer I attended a presentation at TechEd on Group Policy. One organization in the crowd had over 5,000 Group Policies. In an environment like that, the comment section can be priceless. I always like to write in the comment section why I created the policy so I know its purpose next week after I've completed 50 other tasks and can't remember what I did 5 minutes ago. In the Group Policy module for PowerShell V3, th

Return duplicate values from a collection with PowerShell

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How to list all the AD LDS instances on a server

AD LDS allows you to provide directory services to applications that are free of the confines of Active Directory. To list all the AD LDS instances on a server, follow this procedure: Log into the server in question Open a command prompt. Type dsdbutil and press Enter Type List Instances and press Enter . You will receive a list of the instance name, both the LDAP and SSL port numbers, the location of the database, and its status.

Jason Yoder, MCT

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