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On Friday 14 March 2008 10:39:27 Esther Reed wrote: > Do you allow your users to attach their personal devices to the MSU PCs > that they use (and you support)? > If yes, do you have any protection in place? What works and what > doesn't? > If no, do you have a departmental policy or just rely on > good-citizenship? Do you disable the USB ports on the front of PCs? > > We've been wrestling with this issue over here. We do not have a policy > in place; we do allow staff to attach their own USB keys, etc. but we > ask our student staff to not use their devices. Today's CNN article > emphasizes more dangers with allowing users to do this, so I am > wondering how different departments are handling it. > > http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/03/13/factory.installed.virus.ap/inde > x.html > <http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/03/14/lawrence.burning.homes.c > nn> > > Thanks for any feedback and ideas! > > ~ Esther Well, to me the idea of disabling a USB port would be cause for a riot where I am in Political Science. People use their computers in a huge variety of ways, and anything I could think of as a standard for usage would be broken by some new novel use and get folks mad at me 'till I fixed something. So Political Science doesn't restrict anything, but I continually try to inform the users of various dangers of things, and have attempted to instill a philosophy of being aware of things, and to ask me questions when things don't seem right. Largely, its working. People still send me emails that they think are fraudulent, and basically they're right--some ask for verification, but they have the smarts now to see a problem. As I see it things all circle around security issues. The more adventurous folks are, the more problems can crop up. So rather than trying to "protect" people, I try to armour plate them in terms of what and what not to do. --STeve Andre'