US Military’s Classified Documents Defense: Ban USB Sticks

By: on 12.13.10
USB Stick

USB Stick

In an attempt to limit the capabilities of personnel to leak classified documents, the US military has placed a ban on all removable storage. After losing the confidentiality of over 250,000 cables to a CD-R labeled Lady Gaga, is this precautionary measure enough to prevent future leaks or is it a superficial fix to a deeper problem? Either way, military personnel will have a harder time trading pop songs. Read the full article on mashable.com

Author:

Zach Superior

Zach Superior graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts for television writing, but spends most of his time in HTML editors and Photoshop.

Filed Under: Top Stories
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    Our principle business is rackmount computers in military applications. The ban on thumb drives has become a big a problem as these were the preferred method for driver updates. Most of our military customers are now requiring that the USB ports be disabled, either in hardware, or by simply filling the port with hot melt glue. Driver updates require opening the chassis to connect an external device such as a floppy which is a bit inconvenient. Opening the chassis is the key requirement so it takes awhile to do and somebody can’t just quickly copy to a stick.

    The alternative is removable hard drives. Not bad in a non-Windows environment but major updates can break Windows requiring new activation. Many of our customers use XP with some switching over to Win 7. Nobody used Vista.

    Sold a bunch of rugged laptops to the Navy and all external communication (WIFI, Bluetooth) and ports (USB, Ethernet, RS232) had to be disabled in hardware, in some cases by cutting traces on the motherboard. That’s how serious these guys have become.

    Kind of like the Underwear Bomber. One guy sucks the SIPRnet and everybody suffers.