A California company on Thursday released a free utility that system administrators can use to monitor portable storage devices connected to PCs on their networks.
SmartLine's DeviceLock Plug-and-Play Auditor is a Windows tool that reports on the USB, FireWire, and PCMCIA devices currently jacked into the network's PCs. Administrators can select machines to audit from the Microsoft Network tree or from any LDAP tree, set the auditor to take system snapshots for comparison, and export the results to Microsoft Excel.
The auditor, which is a subset of SmartLine's $35 DeviceLock -- software that assigns peripheral port rights to deny use of, for instance, USB-based flash drives -- can be downloaded from the company's Web site (http://www.devicelock.com/).
