Fergie's Tech Blog

NASA Curbs Removable Media Use

Wyatt Kash writes on GCN.com:

NASA chief information officer Jonathan Pettus clarified the agency’s policy curbing the use of removable media in the wake of recent security concerns. The policy appeared in an internal memo.

New details about security concerns at NASA, independent of the memo, emerged in a report by BusinessWeek published last weekend. It details a series of significant and costly cyberattacks on NASA systems in the past decade.

The memo from Pettus instructs employees not to use personal USB drives or other removable media on government computer systems. It also directs employees not to use government-owned removable devices on personal machines or machines that do not belong to the agency, department or organization. And it warns employees not to put unknown devices into any systems and to ensure that systems are fully patched and have up-to-date antivirus software.

The directive is not as sweeping as one issued by the Defense Department, which temporarily forbids the use of USB drives and other removable media devices of all types as a step toward mitigating the spread of detected malware.

posted by Fergie @ 11/27/2008 05:52:00 PM