US Defense partially lifts ban on USB devices but, at what cost?
USB ports today are universal gateways for data transfer . If your security policy says , block it completely, this is what is going to happen:-
Gradually you end up opening ports one by one. Sometimes you remember to block it back once you purposed for opening it is solved, and sometimes you just forget about it. What happens when the number of machines in your computer network is huge, something like more than 5000 windows machines or may be 10,000. In case of defense organization it definitely will be more than 25,000.
With the introduction of next generation portable devices, security of data in a computer network is supposed to go even worse. Think about tablet PCs and all sorts of portable devices claimed to be small and a version representing a transition from laptops and PDAs to something between laptops and PDAs.
US defense issued a policy to block all kinds of portable media devices like USB drives, memory sticks, SD Cards, Portable hard drives, thumb drives etc. The ban was issued in November 2008 by the U.S. Strategic Command after a virus, a variation of the SillyFDC worm, was found to be spreading through military networks by copying itself from one removable drive to another.
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