news.com.au — Network manageres are using tubes of super glue to protect their systems from data theft. Outfits are getting so hot and bothered at the loss of corporate data that they are removing writable drives and ordering network staff to pour superglue into USB ports. Nothing a little "cut and paste" won't fix!
Jul 4, 2006 View in Crawl 4
evilkillerJul 4, 2006
Why not just disable the usb in group policies.
garble7Jul 4, 2006
With Vista you can turn on a Policy that will allow USB keyboard/mice to be used but not any other types of USB hardware. You can also allow only certain USB flash drives (The teachers for example) while disabling all of the other ones that may be tried
glitch82Jul 4, 2006
As an IT consultant with many years experience in the business of fixing and securing machines for corporations, it never ceases to amaze me how incompetent some of these system adminstrators are. There are plenty of OS, software and hardware solutions to secure systems but these administrators either aren't resourceful enough, or don't want to go through the effort of learning to do things the right way.A domain with a good security policy, individual strong passwords and proper file system and administration security profiles only need to be set once. Voiding your motherboard warranty by super gluing USB ports, and then having to re-glue them again when you get a replacement board is definitely not intelligent.
samuelcotterallJul 5, 2006
A friend of mine was telling me that when he worked as a network admin at some large company, they did it to prevent a) people using the internet connection to download music to their MP3 player/USB disk [in a time when home ADSL was still £50/m] and b) uploading ANYTHING to the network.They went to the extent of crimping the USB ports shut.
kenwestinJul 5, 2006
Actually a particular military agencey was doing the same thing.Instead endpoint security software should be used that will allow granular access controls that allows the admin to decide who has permissions to plug-in which devices to their computer and if they have read/write access to that device.<a class="user" href="http://www.devicewall.com">http://www.devicewall.com</a> ...and yes I work for them.
berberramaJul 6, 2006
@tempusrob - And they can just as easily be terminated.
pjbonovoxJul 8, 2006
"After the lease is up, you have the oportunity to buy the equiptment at a lower price."It's a false economy and you know it.
dfloyd888Jul 8, 2006
Sounds like a well run university. Deep Freeze, locked BIOS, case-locked machines with a fiber-optic cable alarm that gets the local uni's PD there in 1-2 minutes, swipe card access, and a NetBotz or other camera watching the room pretty much will stop all but an insider from doing anything. If the PD doesn't catch the person red-handed, between swipe card access and the camera, it can be figured out who did what pretty easily.
dnthompsJul 10, 2006
you can also get a PS2 to USB converter.