USB Thumb Drives, technical boon or IT's bane?


What's to stop someone from walking up with a memory key, plugging it in, and copying to their hearts content?

Recently I was at a conference where I gave a presentation. At the end of a presentation lots of people ran up to me asking if I could give them the presentation on their USB thumb key/memory key whatever you want to call them. While this is very handy and it allowed me to get a 7MB file off my machine quickly, I also sat there thinking 'what about the files I don't want them to have'

While I had control of my computer at all times, there was something else that had me thinking. I have files on my machine that are corporate confidential, and even people within my own company don't need to see/know yet because they don't know the context in which the documentation is done in (IE 2 year forecast on technology, etc). There are times where my computer is running and up on sitting at the front of the hotel room.

What's to stop someone from walking up with a memory key, plugging it in, and copying to their hearts content?

In short, from what I've figured out so far. Nothing. Especially if it's within the 5 min I've walked away from my computer and not locked it up. Also what about putting some code on the key that makes it auto-mount and then start copying? It's not like Windows (or really any OS that I know of) doesn't have some process going on when the key is first inserted. How hard would it be to say 'hey a mass storage device just appeared on your bus, do you want to mount it or fry it?'

Probably something someone who writes the OS code for all the operating systems might want to be looking into. Not always is a memory key/thumb drive coming from someone nice...

Posted: Sat - August 21, 2004 at 11:29 AM           |

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