81–90 of 202 posts
This 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.
What sort of Fortune x00 company doesn't use a corporate VPN?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
or unplug a mouse for 5 seconds
If you're going through the trouble of epoxying USB ports, you could probably epoxy the mouse to its port as well. Or just monitor connected USB devices and shutdown if something unapproved is installed, a la USBKill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USBKill
This 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.
What sort of Fortune x00 company doesn't use a corporate VPN?
Otherwise I fail to see the point, anyone could easily just send anything to anywhere over the net. Don't need a USB.
Therefore, It seems to me this is about unintentional leaks of information, not intentional.
Interesting but seems kind of late, no? Even the US State Department has banned USB drives since at least 2008. I don't think US government is particularly well known for being good at security.
This 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 O…
Are cases locked / glued shut? It seems like it would be easy enough to connect a new usb header...
Well sure. I think the idea is to prevent mistakes and people just randomly plugging usb sticks they get from conferences as gifts or when they work from home. People will forget and do that anyway even if it is the rule.
When someone start disassembling the laptop or runs around with a screw driver trying to get the epoxy out of the ports, it would a bit hard to claim it was an accidental mistake. In that case, those people can probably find a way to exfiltrate data or to infect the system without the aid of USB keys.
Would it be possible to just disable the usb driver from the OS(or just limit it, to a very very few tasks). Without it being a burden for UX purposes. One could argue that an exploit might be written in such a way that, it could be triggered before the OS boots from the BIOS. But, at that point, any external user-land exploit would provide the same level of access to sensitive data.
Yes, but think about what verifying that would look like. Epoxy is much easier to install and it doesn't disappear 3 months later when a Windows update ships.
This 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 O…
> the usb ports are disabled and the usb ports on new issue computers are epoxied to prevent trying to use them. That means many current day laptops can't be charged.
This 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 O…
How can they prevent migration of talented people, given China's infinite war chest ?