The NSA has developed an internal tool to help government agencies track the use of unauthorized USB storage devices on their internal network; I suppose this is a good thing from a security-centric point of view. After all, portable flash drives are typically misplaced or lost all around the world, and what better way to prevent this from happening than to prohibit their use in the first place?

As reported by Ars Technica, information pertaining to the tool, called USBDetect, was briefly described in NSA's 2010 budget proposal. The budget proposal notes that: "The USBDetect tool provides USG network administrators and system security officials with an automated capability to detect the introduction of USB storage devices into their networks."

How exactly does one detect for the presence of a USB portable drive? While I obviously have no way to verify the inner workings of the tool, I do know from prior reading that the Windows operating system creates a unique registry entry for each USB flash drive that you plug into the system. This is the reason why plugging in a new flash drive will result in a brief pause while Windows goes about "detecting and installing" it, an exercise that is not repeated on subsequent usage. It is likely that USBDetect operates on this principal to do its work.

Beyond stuffing epoxy into the USB ports or disabling it entirely from the BIOS though, I'm curious on commercial tools that can block or detect the usage of USB storage devices. How does your organization cope with the threat of unauthorized USB storage (and devices)? Feel free to add to the comments--I look forward to hearing from you.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Ars Technica

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