In article , Paul
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.

meanwhile, ethernet ports remained active...

You know that Ethernet ports can be blocked, right ?

of course, except that would make the computer rather useless.

the point is that blocking usb ports, especially at a time when there
weren't very many usb devices available (as in almost nothing, it was
usb 1.0 days), while leaving everything else wide open, is completely
pointless.

A manager at work learned this the hard way. The IT department
would only schedule a workstation move, for a date a few weeks
into the future. The newly minted manager said "come on, you lads,
and help me move this computer" (the gentleman was an "I don't
take No for an answer" type).

The routers were set up with MAC filtering, so "strange" Ethernet
devices would be ignored. And sure enough, upon connecting the
machine and booting... "no network" was the result.

finding a valid mac address and spoofing it is incredibly trivial.

mac address filtering is a very big clue that the sysadmins do not
understand anything about network security.