Disabling USB Storage in Ubuntu for Security

For security reasons, many businesses are completely disabling USB storage devices on the computers at work. Particularly if you are like me and work with healthcare information, it's doubly important that not only no one can bring in a virus, but that they also can't leave with any private information.

In Linux the risk of viruses are small to nonexistent, however USB sticks automatically mount for reading and writing regardless. There's an easy way in recent Ubuntu distributions to disable USB storage devices. Simply blacklist the kernel driver:

sudo echo "blacklist usb-storage" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

After that, nobody can use a USB memory stick in that computer, but still allows the administrator(s) to manually load the module and use it. I'll be giving more enterprise Linux tips in the near future if all goes well.