The US military has lifted its outright ban on portable media devices. The ban was put into place after it was found that users had used devices to install Malware on government computer systems. There is a great video about this from 60 minutes that can be viewed using the link below.
The new policy for using portable media devices are quite strict, as they should be. The devices can only be used for mission critical situations and they all must go through inspection and be sanitized before they can be used. They must also be government purchased and government owned with a strict ban on personally owned devices. There is no mention of the technical controls being implemented but without some technical means to enforce these policies it will be hard to prevent abuse.
Similar requirements were written into my organizations policy; organization purchased, organization owned, authorized users, authorized work, and absolutely no personally owned devices. But as I stated above, without a technical mechanism to scan, audit, report, and enforce the policy people are basically on their word.
CBS News “Sabotaging The System”
Information Week
Posted by
Mike Wright
