Most of security threats to organizations information are internal and open USB ports are one of the key sources for unethical employees to get access to important information. In addition to that open USB ports may affect your important systems with viruses, Trojans and Spywares.

So it’s the duty of system administrators to take care of this security issue. This article tells how to enable disable USB port. There sre various ways in which USB devices can be disabled. You can disable USB in BIOS settings and lock the BIOS settings by setting a BIOS password. But if your users are smart then it’s possible for them to reset BIOS settings.

Another way to disable USB port is by performing registry edit. Open registry edit by typing regedit in Start-> RUN Then Locate and click the following registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesUsbStor
In the right pane, double-click Start.
In the Value data box, type 4 and then click OK.

To enable the USB storage devices again reset the start value to 3 for the above specified key.

Image courtesy: Microsoft