As a best practice however, you should always use the group policy option, unless you have a compelling reason to delve into the registry.
Change the value of Start to 4.Īs you can see, it is possible to prevent access to USB storage devices, either at the group policy level, or through the Windows registry. You can see what this registry key looks like in Figure 5. Microsoft recommends setting the value of the Start key to 4. So with that said, the registry key that controls USB media access is named Start and is located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBStor. Making a mistake while editing the registry can destroy Windows and/or your applications. Remember that editing the registry is dangerous, because doing so bypasses all of the usual OS-level safeguards. Before I do, I want to point out that you should back up your system before continuing. There are several different methods for accomplishing this, but I will show you the easiest. The computer is now preventing the use of USB storage devices.Īs I mentioned earlier, it is possible to disable USB storage device access at the registry level. Now, if you plug in a USB storage device, you will see a message like the one that is shown in Figure 4. To force a policy update, open an administrative Command Prompt window, and enter the following command: GPUpdate /Force If you would like to try out this policy setting, you can enable it and then either reboot your computer or force a policy update. The All Removable Storage Classes Deny All Access setting blocks all access to removable media. You can see what this setting looks like in Figure 3. Go to this link and select your OS as Windows 7/XP/Vista and version as FP 32 for Internet. If you prefer to block removable media access regardless of type, however, then the best setting to enable is the All Removable Storage Classes Deny All Access setting. Figure 2.There are numerous settings related to removable media use.īecause the group policy settings are based on media type, you can take a granular approach to storage configuration by disabling the use of USB storage, while leaving access to other types of removable media enabled. There are even some legacy settings related to floppy drive use. For example, there are several settings related to DVD and CD drives. However, not all of these settings are related to USB devices. So with that said, open the Group Policy Editor, and navigate through the console tree to Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System | Removable Storage Access.Īs you can see in Figure 2, there are actually quite a few policy settings available for controlling access to removable storage. USB storage devices can be disabled either at the group policy level, or through the registry, but the group policy approach tends to be the safer option.
Right now my PC can access USB media with no problem. Even so, I will use this flash drive to demonstrate the ability to lock out USB media.
It contains the slide deck for a presentation that I am giving at a Microsoft MVP event in Orlando next week. If you look at Figure 1, you can see a Windows File explorer, and you can also see the contents of a particular USB flash drive. Thankfully, Microsoft makes it relatively easy to block unauthorized USB storage devices. The question is, what can you do about it? Unauthorized storage devices can even enable the spread of malware.
The use of such a device could lead to data leakage, or the user might use a USB storage device to install an unauthorized application. One of the most serious is using an unauthorized USB storage device. If anyone has any suggestions that may help it will make my kids a little less annoyed with me.Let's face it, there are a lot of things that a user could do to potentially undermine an organization's IT security.
I found a Website saying that my FlashPlayer might be corrupted, but it's recommendations were to uninstall/reinstall, which I have done twice.Īnother website said that I might need to give Funkeys permission to run flash player, but I don't know how to do that. I have uninstalled and reinstalled my Adobe Flash Player. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Funkeys. I install the program, but everytime I try to run it I get a message that says, "You must install Adobe FlashPlayer 9.0 or higher to run this program." The problem is that I have Adobe Flash Player 10. Unfortunately this process has taken me most of the day and it is still not running. We have had the computer for about 2 weeks now and I am just getting around to installing it. The problem is that UB Funkeys doesn't have a very good support site and I cannot get it to run on my new computer. While I am sure this is not an exciting game for most of you my kids really like to play it.