Microsoft Defender for Endpoint will now protect your removable storage and printers
Microsoft’s endpoint protection product also adds new Mac capabilities
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Microsofthas added new controls to help businesses secure theirremovable storage devicesandprintersto address the increased security concerns brought on by the increase ofremote working.
The company reasons that the work-from-anywhere environment has widened the attack surface area, which has led it to expand the scope of the enterprise version of itsWindows 10 Defenderprotection product.
“We are excited to announce new device control capabilities in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to secure removable storage scenarios onWindowsandmacOSplatforms and offer an additional layer of protection for printing scenarios,”wroteTewang Chen, a Technical Program Manager at Microsoft.
The new capabilities are designed to allow administrators to exercise access restrictions on removable devices and reign in printing tasks on non-corporate or non-approved printers.
Wider net
In the post Chen adds that the new printer protection feature allows admins to block users from printing to a non-corporatenetwork printeror non-approvedUSB printer.
Furthermore, the new removable storage access control capabilities added to the Windows version of the security platform complement the existing device control protections for tasks such as installing a new device, removing BitLocker storage, and others.
With the new removable storage access control, admins will be able to audio, allow, or prevent the read, write, or execute permissions to removable storage based on various device properties, such as Vendor ID and serial number.
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Furthermore, the platform now offers removable storage protection on Mac as well. This adds to the endpoint platform growing capabilities on Mac. Notably, last monthMicrosoft added supportfor detecting jailbrokeniOS devicesto the product.
Chen added that while removable storage access control on Windows and removable storage protection on Mac are generally available, printer protection on Windows is currently available as a public preview.
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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