Windows Vista clients can be configured to prevent this theft possibility. I don't understand how inserting and using a foreign/unauthorized USB memory stick interferes with someone's ability to get work done.

There is nothing that can be done about this from the technical side. It will always be possible. If you lock down the computers to the point that they can't do this, they won't be able to get any work done either.

Very little has changed. In the past people could walk out the door with boxes full of copied documents from the company archives and noone would blink, today they copy those same documents to a flashdrive or CDR (yes, ever more people have CDR drives in their systems at work).

The idea is to not allow people access to things they have no need to see, and to make them happy enough that they have no incentive on leaving to steal things (and make sure they know the consequences if caught).

My father could easily have walked out on his job as a tax/business consultant at a major firm with damning information about hundreds of companies (including the one he worked for and all the customers of his department) and noone would have noticed.
At the time his only computer access was a mainframe terminal and a 5150 series IBM luggable which he can't carry because of his bad back...
But as a senior consultant he had access to all the archives as well as having copies of ALL client files for his department in his office and a photocopier just around the corner in the hallway.
He also had the keys to the building so he could work nights and weekends.

Noone ever checks who takes boxes of paper and other small stuff from store rooms and noone ever checks who uses photocopiers (in most companies, there are some where you have to swipe a keycard to use them at all, mainly to enable billing per department), so making copies would have gone unnoticed.
Do it over a weekend and he could have done it.
It could have brought him a LOT of money too most likely, but he never even dreamed of doing it.

People who do dream of doing such things however won't be stopped by pretty much anything set up to prevent them. They'll always find a way. All you can do is make it harder for people who should not have had access to the information in the first place to find the information, but once you've found it you can always take it out one way or another.

And indeed, maybe you can't cram into your head what you can cram onto a flashdrive. Not in one go at least...
But you will have time, take it out in bits and pieces.
Less chance to get noticed too...

Information is becoming the key to it all. Whether a company continues to provide access to the level of information currently able to be sourced on a USB key remains to be seen. But something has to change, or we can probably expect to see an international court case about stolen company information.

Now zonelabs are just about my favourite antispyware tool, next to Dr spyware - so I anxiously await the new Vista version of zonelabs.

notbad

Vista clients can be configured to prevent this theft possibility.

As a previous poster pointed out, yes good treatment of employees is a great practice for infosec but sometimes this comes down to dollars and potential profit for the thieves.

Great article.

Some (not all, of course) of this kind of thing would be eliminated, or at least minimized, if companies put as much effort and sincerity into treating their employees fairly and right as they do enriching some of these CEO's to sit on their dead behinds all day.

far more damaging is all the information those people carry out in their heads!
All the years of training you spend on them, all the secrets about your company processes and products they accumulated through creating them.

Must not allow your people to take their heads out of the building!