How to protect your portable devices?

Jayanta Ghosh

In today's world we need access to data even when we're on the move. To achieve that, we use all kinds of portable devices, which are very handy source of transferring data. But the flip side is that these devices have also become a popular carrier for malware to enter a network.

GFI EndPoint Security is a tool that is used to control access to network for portable storage media and other devices such as USB drives, CDs, DVDs, network adapters, PDAs, printers, imaging devices and floppies. In addition, it also protects your network against threats posed by existing non-removable media, such as data theft and virus infection from within your network. 

One of the best things in this utility is that it's easily configurable and can be controlled via Active Directory. It provides group based control protection which helps you set different protection levels for PCs, at the same time retaining previous settings. This software can also be used to configure user permissions to fully deny access to devices or configure them in read only or 'full access' mode.

How to use

Installing GFI Endpoint security is simple. It can be installed on Windows 2000, 2003 and XP Pro. When you first open the software, a quick start wizard will popup to guide you through the steps required to set up GFI EndPoint Security. The wizard will ask you to specify the computers you want to protect in the domain. By default, GFI has three access protection policies for servers, laptops and workstations.

You can also customize these policies. To create a new protection policy goes to File and then open New Protection policy. Here you will have to specify a unique name and description for the protection policy. Now select the portable devices to be controlled by selecting the device and then click on Add. You can also specify the users and groups that will be allowed to access the device in this policy. An important thing to remember is that, a non-controlled device is fully accessible by all users, while a controlled device with an empty list of users is completely blocked

Next you have to deploy protection policy updates on target computers and verify that policy updates have been successfully deployed. You can view the security event logs generated by GFI EndPoint Security. The event can be viewed using Windows Event Viewer or in a centralized location like SQL Server. When a deployment process has ended, the software will generate a report about the results of the deployment with details such as the list of systems where deployment was successful and those where it was not, along with the reasons thereof.