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With USB Under Control, you can have, besides the USB device, the devices connected via PCMCIA, FireWire, IrDA, Bluetooth and others under control.

How does USB Under Control work from a user’s perspective?

The fundamental change for the user in an organization is the fact that all his activity related to the USB device will be monitored and everything will be known. At this moment, the environment of a computer is no longer anonymous. This is a principal change, which itself, in major cases, increases the realization of the users and decreases the threats stemming from the use of a USB device.

Otherwise, nothing changes for a normal user. In case he/she will want to use a forbidden device, he/she will be informed that it is forbidden and it will be impossible to use it. In case he/she will store, on an external memory medium, files to work with outside the internal network of the organization, these files will become unreadable. The same applies, when he/she copies files outside the internal network of the organization onto any external memory medium.

For a normal, loyal employee, the implementation of USB Under Control increases the control of his/her behavior, which works as a fuse in case of his erroneous or unintentional behavior. 

How does USB Under Control work from the administrator’s perspective?

Each computer of the network of the organization must have the EP-eP client installed, which can perform any of the listed three steps leading to building a trustworthy environment. An axiomatic presumption for implementation of USB Under Control is central administration, which allows the automatic installation of the clients of USB Under Control on the organization’s computer, setup control, update, downloading log records, evaluation, etc.

The setup of USB Under Control itself can be interconnected with Active Directory and managed for a specific computer or user. In case of setup for a user, the possibility remains to setup for security groups and organizational units wherein the user belongs. By creation and editing of simple templates, the settings for a user or a computer can be adjusted at any time, and distributed to the user or computer.

Monitoring of the work of users creates log records on the user’s activities. These log records are transferred to the designated server where they are collected on a regular basis. Immediate questions based on these log records about the user’s activities can be performed immediately from the central administration. The performed activity of a user is, in fact, immediately accessible to the administrator in the log record. An import into an SQL database is performed for a global evaluation of the activities, where the logs are prepared for generating many various reports for various work positions.

One part of the monitoring of user’s activities is an alert system, allowing the setting of potentially dangerous actions. It is typically the unusual behavior of a user, which could mean a threat for documents, information or data of the organization. In this case, an e-mail is sent automatically or a differently defined action is launched, which allows the informing of the responsible persons.

The list of the allowed or prohibited USB devices (black/white lists) can be created by the administrator via the central administration. The detection is automatic, by inserting the pertinent device in any arbitrary computer of the organization. By entering a device on a list, it automatically distributes to all other computers or users.

Encryption – salvation for safety of documents outside the company

The only possibility for prevention of using the content of an external memory medium outside the internal network of the organization is encryption. The times when encryption was a privilege of secret and reporting services are far gone. Today, we are surrounded by encryption. Within the central administration, an encryption policy is managed which includes, mainly, the administration of encrypting keys and their distribution to the users. Any and all files saved to an external memory medium are encrypted on-line without any knowledge of the user. Such external memory medium is readable only inside the computer network of the organization.

To meet all the expectations of an organization, USB Under Control provides a portal interface to generate various reports and detailed evaluations of the user’s activities in case of the need to document the potential attack. Defining various roles allows the access and generation of the required types of reports above various groups of users.