Microbit and USB Access

[bclarke]

We have just taken delivery of the Microbit and I am looking forward to trying it out. As a rule, we ban memory sticks here because of the potential for malware, ransomware and virus's.

 

I am being advised by the ICT teacher who has also taken advice from the people training her that we must allow memory sticks to make this work because Windows sees it as an external drive.

 

I am looking at solutions, but I am wondering first, how many of you have blocked memory sticks being used as I am being told that very few schools and organisations block memory sticks (we are going to be a 1:1 school with Surfaces and we have O365 in any case). If I am in the minority then perhaps I am one of those old blokes set in his ways who needs to catchup. In which case I have been doing this too long!

 

The second part is, how and what are you doing as IT people to enable the microbit in the classroom with IT in mind.

 

Incidentally, we are just about to convert a room for engineering which will have isolated PC's. This may be the solution in any case.

 

Many thanks

 

Ben

[tmoon-mint]

Not sure on the microbit part but as far as I was aware blocking memory sticks was standard procedure.

[skell]

Standard practice where exactly? We don't ban them, and previous schools I worked in didn't ban them.

[3s-gtech]

Not banned here, but I have lots of SRPs etc in place to try to mitigate some of the threats they pose. Not tested the Microbits here yet, but they should work for the students.

[clockend25]

We don't ban them outright, we just knobble autoplay and block anything being executed from them.

[bossman]

We don't ban them either but have network policies in place to stop the usual crud being ran, staff have encrypted USB's and use Safehouse encryption which we push out to all workstations (Its free).

 

Haven't tried the Microbit yet as we are still waiting for ours.