2 months ago I talked about how to disabe removable storage devices such as USB drives. This can be done locally if you have access to the system by a UsbStor value in registry. Now you can enable or disable removable storage devices remotely without even being in front of the computer. Of course you’ll need to authenticate yourself to the remote computer in order to make any changes.
Here is another useful free tool from IntelliAdmin called USB Remote Disabler. Basically it uses the same way to disable or enable the removable storage devices except this has the function of authenticating yourself to a remote computer and making changes to the remote computer’s registry.
This free tool only disables storage devices. USB mouse, keyboard, scanner will still work fine when this is in place. For a small network, this tool is definitely a must to have. If only this tool is able to remotely disable or enable removable storage devices for the whole network subnet, then it would be useful for administrators that manages big networks that has hundreds or thousands of workstations 😉
Anyway, it is small enough to fit on a floppy, and does not need any 30MB .net runtimes, or DLLs. It also works without an install. This tool is 849KB in size and I’d prefer if this size can be reduced further. Perhaps some DLLs are embedded into the USBRemoteDisabler.exe to avoid having problems of missing DLLs.