Product idea: a dongle with male & female USB connector, that you can place between USB drive and computer, and which catches possible security violations.
IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
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Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#12I remember they came to our school to show off their new hot desk software they wrote. Look how efficiently we can use space! I saw it as saying your so unimportant we won't even give you a dedicated desk. Now apparently you can't even use common tools to get the job done. If I had a big meeting I wouldn't take a chance on the network to keep my presentation.
Hot desk-ing mostly makes sense only if you're 1.) short on space and 2.) have a fair number of people who only come in intermittently. Otherwise, you're not really saving anything and you make it harder to find people who aren't sitting in a fixed location.
Presentations would be the big inconvenience for me. I always carry a backup on a USB stick when I'm presenting at an event or conference. Just today, I loaded a presentation onto a conference laptop that was supposed to have been preloaded but wasn't. I could probably have worked around by getting the presentation off the network but I never like to depend on WiFi at an event.
ADDED: Especially for an external public presentation, I'd get it onto a USB stick one way or the other.
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#13This is already standard practice for several industries. For example, you’d be hard pressed to find a pharma company nowadays that allows the use of any removable media.
The likely “replacement” is that IBM employees will have to use some sort of corporate VPN to work remotely.
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#14Within a business, security has to be understood in the context of risk analysis. Will the measures taken damage the company more than the benefit of the increased security? In my eyes, banning storage media without a practical replacement is on the wrong side of the risk analysis equation. Sure, it's not desirable that files can be moved without full access control and auditing, but if people don't have a tool that…
In this case, is cloud storage not a practical replacement?
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#15Within a business, security has to be understood in the context of risk analysis. Will the measures taken damage the company more than the benefit of the increased security? In my eyes, banning storage media without a practical replacement is on the wrong side of the risk analysis equation. Sure, it's not desirable that files can be moved without full access control and auditing, but if people don't have a tool that…
With the rise of VPNs, fast home internet, and fairly ubiquitous public wifi along with laptops gaining enough power for most applications the question is what's the real use case that requires removable media that can't be accomplished with an internal FTP/network drive/email and using company laptops?
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#16Product idea: a dongle with male & female USB connector, that you can place between USB drive and computer, and which catches possible security violations.
There is already some Windows software that monitor the USB ports for storage devices and blocks them.
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#17This is common at many semiconductor companies. Not only is it a ban at one specific semiconductor oem I know of, the usb-ports are disabled and the usb-ports on new issue computers are epoxied to prevent trying to use them.
Semiconductor technology is one of the areas of global-technological competition which surely benefit from secrecy. For example, several years ago one of the c-level executives at this specific OEM was caught taking pictures inside of one of their customer's facility. Only the engineering staff from that oem is allowed inside those facilities now, and only for maintenence activity.
It's a very secret industry, and getting even tighter now since China has been blocked from acquiring the latest semiconductor technology. China has so far invested over $40 billion in boosting their chip-making abilities, to acquire capital, IP, and knowledge-workers. Given their history of borrowing technology from other countries without attribution, if I were at the head of a semiconductor related company, I would clamp down on the secrets ahead of the danger.
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#18Product idea: a dongle with male & female USB connector, that you can place between USB drive and computer, and which catches possible security violations.
Until 'they' figure out a way to tunnel through the dongle for yet more security violations, haha.
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#19Don’t FB and Goog already do this in practice if not completely enforced (i.e. epoxying the connectors). What’s the news about this?
Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office
#20Seems like the move addresses accidental data leaks through portable device misplacement. I don't think it can do much to protect against intentional leaking. I mean, they want people to be able to work from anywhere from the sake of business, so I guess this addresses 1 vector. Hopefully, they understand this.
It's not stuff getting out that's the problem. It's stuff getting in. This move addresses the certainty that if a malicious actor manages to drop a flash drive in the parking lot it's practically certain that it will be plugged in.
When you're a large global company like IBM you become the target of lot of groups.