Computer IP Sercurity

[rossilinni]

I asked on this forum a couple of months back about improving the sercurity of my company computer. We use it to train/assess people on - they have to do things on the computer(Dell Inspiron) and are left alone in room. There is a temptation to try and remove the materials we have - they have some value.

Anyway I got some excellent advice a couple of months ago will be acting - but need to still use the Dell for the next few months.

The one thing that froze me was the person who mentioned( and showed a picture) of USB ports connected up to a PCI card. I am obviously pretty open here - is there any way I can disable this capacity.

[Saab Dastard]

Dell Inspiron and PCI card?

A PCI card in a laptop? This I must see!!

Perhaps you mean PC card, or PCMCIA card!

Is it possible to disable the PC card slot in the bios?

If not, just superglue the blanking plate in the card slot!

SD

[rossilinni]

Thanks - what I did mean to say was PC Card - just the standard thing that people use to get wireless internet suggestion.

I will try the bios.

My glue of choice is two part epoxy. I know a lot of the people here will think that I am crazy but that is how I secured the hard drive in place - just splashed the epoxy all over the screws and cover.

Is there anywhere in control panel to disable the PC card.

Cheers

Rossi

[rossilinni]

OK been doing some " research"

MiniPCI card is internal has no relevance to what I am talking about and in any case can be disabled via the BIOS.

The PC card (fits in just above hard drive ) cannot be disabled via the BIOS - no control for there. I have read there is one connector for the PC Card - how would one disable this?

I have been looking in the control panel(device manager) and found under system devices something called a PCI Card bus - is this of any use to me?

More information: the device that is the concern is this thing called a USB/ PCMCIA card. Another suggestion was to make put a password protection on - to activate the drivers. Computer security is like holding a slimy eel.

[Bushfiva]

You can get USB port locks, priced from cheap/ineffective to not so cheap/quite effective.

[ZH875]

rossilinni, you have a PM.

Rgds

ZH

[swordfling]

I believe you can do it in the registry... I've not tried it myself, so try this at your own risk!

To disable USB storage devices altogether, change the value of the Start key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor from 3 to 4. You can get a free tool (http://www.intelliadmin.com/DisableUSB_Free.exe) from IntelliAdmin to do it for you if you don't want to mess with the registry yourself.

To disable write access to the USB ports, and still have them available for read access, add a DWORD key called WriteProtect under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageD evicePolicies, and set the value to 0 to disable write access, 1 to enable. Note that this may affect use of USB printers etc.

Not sure about any PCMCIA based devices though... perhaps you could disable the controller in Device Manager.

I haven't read your previous topic, so this may have been covered already, but make sure users can't transfer the information you want to protect by other methods such as internet (bearing in mind it may be disguised when transfered), or bluetooth.

Hope that helps.