Apply read-only permission for USB devices.

Avoid theft of sensitive information using a USB drive by changing access permissions to read-only using this setting.

Level: Recommended For Experts Only

Description:
Usb flash drives are portable in size that promotes easy carrying and transferring of data. Pocket-sized and lightweight, usb drives can store your music, images or computer files in a snap. They can be comfortably pinned in/out of the pc and data re-written to it. This can cause a threat to sensitive corporate data. To avoid theft of sensitive information you can let users read data from a usb drive, but not write data to that drive. This can be incorporated with a simple registry change. For this, go to start > run menu, enter regedit and navigate to the registry path listed below. You can create a dword value writeprotect in the right panel, if this value does not exist. Now, right-click and modify its value to 1 which can make usb devices read only. However, if you want to give fill access permission again, change the value data to 0 or delete the added value. The changes take effect after a restart or logoff. When editing the registry it is highly recommended to run a quick scan for optimization, you can test your system now for free.