Pisonet Tips Disable USB Ports

[titorick]

Disable USB Ports of Your Computers
This article focuses on the merits and the reasons why it’s a good idea to disable USB ports. The USB Port of your computer is one of the weakest links of your Internet Cafe network. It is usually unsecured and open to all users. If you don’t disable USB ports, anyone can plug in their USB devices and instantly be part of your network. This can lead to some not so happy scenarios:

1. One of your computers being infected by that killer malware from a non-assuming USB Flash Drive?
2. A rival Internet Cafe sent a kid to “borrow” some of your files by copying it to a USB Flash Drive.
3. You banned downloading of Cheat Softwares, but noobs still launched them through their USB Flash Drives.

Disabling access to USB ports is a great way to stop unauthorized users to transfer or steal data from your computer. This guide will show you how to disable the USB ports via the Windows Registry. I did this in Windows 7, but you can also do this for Windows 8 and 10.

Enable/Disable USB Drives By Making Changes In Registry
You can make changes in your Registry files to enable or disable USB ports in Windows 7. Follow these steps:

• Step 1 to 2: Go to Start Menu, type “Regedit” in the Search box to open Registry Editor.
• Step 3: Navigate to this key – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

• Step 4 to 6 : Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

• Step 7: Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR

• Step 8: In the right-hand panel, look for START and right click on it.

• Step 9: A sub-menu will appear, choose Modify

• Step 10: A small pop-up window will open. If the Value is “3”, this means that the USB ports are enabled.
• Step 11: Change the value to 4 to disable the USB ports.
• Click OK to apply changes.

That’s it. If you want to reactivate the USB ports, just return to the last step and change the value from “4” to “3”.