Software Engineering Institute

Removable media, such as universal serial bus (USB) flash drives, present unique problems to the enterprise since insiders can use such media to remove proprietary information from company systems. Insiders may do this for legitimate reasons, such as to work on material at home, or they may do so for malicious reasons, such as to steal intellectual property.

Organizations must establish and implement effective methods and processes to prevent unauthorized use of removable media while still allowing users with a genuine business need to access and remove such media. In addition, organizations should establish sound methods to track critical electronic assets so that they may better protect them.

This report focuses on the theft of intellectual property using removable media, in particular, USB devices. We present methods to control removable media devices in a Microsoft Windows environment using Group Policy within an Active Directory environment. We also explore OpenDLP, an open source tool for identifying where sensitive data resides on organizational systems.