How to Prevent IP Theft by Your Own Employees?

Cursed by USB asks: "We are a small software startup based in India. Recently one of our employees was caught trying to steal our IP (work) from a computer using a USB thumb drive. While all the staff computers are devoid of floppy drives, cd writers and internet connections, we simply cannot disable the USB ports since there are a lot of USB enabled peripherals that we use. Apart from trying to hire "trustworthy" people, are there any other bright ideas that Slashdot readers might have in this regard to help prevent such theft from workplace?"

Comments

Registry control

[brontus3927]

If you are using Windows XP with SP2 you can keep block storage devices from being written to. If you have XP but not SP2, this would be a good reason to install the service pack. If your don't have XP, try searching google for software that will provide the functionality
Start -> Run: regedit

Find the following key:

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: System\CurrentControlSet\Control \StorageDevicePolicies
Name: WriteProtect
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0

This allows writing. Change the value to 1. This will prevent writing. Save your registry and reboot. Of course, it's always recomended to backup your registry before making changes.

Allegedly, Longhorn will have this control without having to hack the registry.

If you are running Windows XP....

[sybarite]

...you can edit the following registry key to change the value of Start from 3 to 4. This will disable the USBSTOR.SYS driver preventing the use of USB filesystems. It will not disable other types of USB devices.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR