Prevent users from exporting confidential info on USB flash drives.

One of the companies I do a lot of work with is a financial services firm, and they’ve made corporate paranoia such a part of their culture for so long, they barely realize that they’re even doing it. For example, one manufacturer refused to sell them PCs without a 3.5-inch floppy built in (this was a while back), so they spent about a month finding a utility that would disable the drives, so that employees couldn’t easily write data to a disk and walk out the building with it. I won’t even tell you what the security on their CD burners looks like.

These USB flash drives, however, have been giving them fits. The things fit on a keychain or in a pocket, hold gobs of data, and work with every computer they’ve got. They can’t just disable the USB ports, either, since they went whole-hog with the USB thing and rely on it for keyboards, mice, scanners, portable tape backup devices, and more. I think they were considering installing microwave blasters in exterior doorways in an attempt to fry the things; fortunately, Microsoft came to the rescue….