USB Mass Storage Devices Verboten in DoD For Now
Tuesday of this past week, US Department of Defense (DoD) military and civilian personnel were informed that DoD had immediately suspended their use of USB and removable media devices, including digital cameras, switches, special data entry devices, personal digital assistants (PDA), hand held computers, printers, network hardware, and removable hard data storage devices (USB memory sticks, cards, etc).
In other words, the use of USB drives, floppy discs, CDs, external drives, flash media cards and all other removable media devices is for the time being banned.
Apparently, DoD's networks suffered a massive hybrid worm/virus attack which the DoD is still trying to contain. It is speculated that the attack originated in a USB type storage device and can also be spread by them, hence the ban.
DoD is requiring all removable media to be scanned before they will be allowed to reconnect to the DoD systems. I know of at least one military installation where all employee USB and other detachable storage media devices have been required to be turned over to their supervisors. The plan, I have been told, is for these devices to be scanned for the virus/worm, and any information stored on them to then be copied onto network servers. Given that it may take nearly an hour to scan each device, it may take awhile to get through them all.
To say that employee productivity has been impacted at DoD installations is an understatement.
As I noted recently, more than half of all new computer viruses are now being written specifically specifically to be spread by USB drives.
Also, last August I wrote about the thumb drives with malicious code being discovered at the Justice Department. I wonder if there is any link.
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