Control Access to Removable Media

DeviceShield lets you manage the use of removable media effectively by controlling user access to them. You can also control the files that can be transferred to a removable device

Monday, January 01, 2007

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

While USB drives, PDAs, DVDs, etc have made data sharing convenient; they have also increased the risk of data theft. DeviceShield provides security against this by controlling access to removable media devices. It can block access to ports such as Infrared, Parallel, PCMCIA, Serial, USB, Wi-Fi and FireWire. It supports devices such as Apple iPod, Blackberry, DVD/CD drives, modems, PalmOS devices, tape drives and USB peripherals. It can also be used to prevent users from transferring files of a particular type such as PDF, Doc, etc. DeviceShield defines access privileges, based on policies. The management of access privileges is done through a central console. These access privileges can be granted based on domain, domain group or an individual user. It can also import users from Windows Active Directory. DeviceShield can be installed on a server or an individual machine. You can also do an audit from DeviceShield and find out details such as the persons using removable media and the type of device being used.

Deploying DeviceShield
You can install DeviceShield on a separate Windows machine and when you start for the first time, a wizard detects the machines running on your network. For this you can choose whether the wizard should do a NetBIOS or TCP/IP discovery or both. Next click on the Discovery button to make the wizard search for machines. Now the wizard will automatically add all discovered machines to its database. Next the wizard asks you to define the default policy for all users. Here choose which ports and devices you want to allow or block permanently. For eg, if you want to block USB devices, select USB devices from Ports menu and move it to selected devices. Now the wizard will ask you to set an access policy for the device. Here you can choose from enabled, disabled and restricted. Now finally the wizard will ask you on which domains and machines you want install the DeviceShield client. You can just uncheck the machines, on which you don't want to install the client and click on Finish. This process will deploy the agent with policies on the machine that you have selected.

In DeviceShield, you can restrict the type of files transferred to a removable media based on extensions

To customize policies for users, go to the DeviceShield main window and click on Policies tab. Here, click on a new policy, wherein you would be asked for the user/group to apply the policy. Now on Authorized/Unauthorized ports and Devices menu, you can choose devices the user will have access to. Similarly, you can configure device models of specific brands, which will override default restrictions. When the user authenticates from domain, the policy automatically gets attached to it.

Page(s)   1