Preventing data loss due to USB flash drives

***Not Fully Tested***

So I've been thinking lately about data loss due to a recent branch of our company all quiting at the same time and deleting as much data as they could without it being notible. (Luckily we had backups to restore what was deleted.)

So what I've come up with won't prevent users from deleting data off their computers or the network, but it will prevent them from stealing information by copying it to flash drives and such.

Navigate to
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

then change the dword "WriteProtect" to "00000001". By making that change whenever a user tries to write data to a external drive they will get a write protect error.

Enjoy