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I am the owner of a small company (4 employees) and I have Win 7 Ultimate on my machine. My other PCs are connected via LAN and they too have Windows 7 on their machine. My question is, is there any way to prevent USB storage devices. Recently I found one of the employee cheating on me and found he is taking away some important projects which he has access too. I'd like to prevent that.

I read some tricks about changing values in registry but those are just tricks. Changing it's value back again would bring back the USB access. I need some genuine way to prevent access to USB. Only me when logged in as Administrator account should be able to access USB storage devices.

Joel Wilson
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  • There's physical locks for USB devices - might be a nice, OS agnostic way to prevent people from misusing USB use – Journeyman Geek Sep 26 '13 at 05:25
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    The tool to prevent the problem you're highlighting is called "Attorney" - Every company should have one. Beyond that do what [Journeyman Geek](http://serverfault.com/questions/541730/how-can-i-disable-usb-removable-devices-except-mouse-and-keyboard#comment623763_541730) suggested, or what the DoD does (shoot epoxy into all the USB ports) – voretaq7 Sep 26 '13 at 15:36
  • Symantec AV allows you to do this...other AV's may as well. – boburob Sep 26 '13 at 15:54
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    You should almost certainly block network access as well. They could copy files to The Cloud when you're not looking. – jscott Sep 28 '13 at 00:19

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The answer is to use a group policy. Please see http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/b08a4d76-d639-49ae-9e4c-2a5aacfd8c7a/how-to-create-group-policy-to-disable-usb-access-to-users ; the second answer tells you how to disable USB storage devices.

You will need to whitelist the devices you want while disabling everything else. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731387(WS.10).aspx

Ry Jones
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