In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

The company I worked for banned them many years ago - for reasons of
(a) concern of theft of secure [either in the government (it was a defence
contractor) or commercial sense] material, and (b) fear of infection.

Exactly. Same with the little 150K employee computer company I worked
for. As soon as USB ports showed up on computers, they were made
inoperable. (No card-readers at that time.) That was well before the
year 2000.

there weren't very many usb peripherals 'well before the year 2000' so
disabling the usb ports didn't make much of a difference.

Huh? The discussion is about USB (memory) sticks!

which didn't exist 'well before the year 2000'.

usb 1.1 was finalized in late 1998 and started to become popular in
1999 as manufacturers ramped up.

usb 1.0 and win95 'support' did exist before that, but it was more of a
technology demo than actual products.

according to wikipedia, the first usb memory stick was available in
mid-december, 2000, so really 2001 when people could buy them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive#History
USB flash drives were invented at M-Systems, an Israeli company, in a
US patent filed in April 5, 1999 by Amir Ban, Dov Moran and Oron
Ogdan, all M-Systems employees at the time. The product was
announced by the company in September 2000, and was first sold by
IBM in 8MB capacity starting December 15, 2000.

meanwhile, ethernet ports remained active...

Duh! Yes, they were quite handy to connect to our *intra*net, thank
you very much! And yes, our Internet gateways were very secure/strict,
TYVM. (Think NET-15 (and -16.)

connect a rogue device to the intranet. done. spoof mac address (easy)
and it will go unnoticed by the admins.

if data theft and malware infection was truly a concern, they'd need to
disable floppy drives and pcmcia slots. did they?

disabling usb was nothing more than fear of the unknown.