How to Disable Writing to USB Devices on Windows 10

Does your PC contain sensitive data?

Do you want to ban the write access to USB devices on your PC?

You will discover in this tutorial the easiest method in the world to write-protect your USB ports.

Whether you have several PCs in a Cyber or you have a desktop PC of which you don’t want anyone plugging in a USB stick, this tutorial will be useful for you.

Before you do any changes to your system (registry in our case) you should create a restore point or create a backup file of your registry.

Let’s go!

1. Enable USB Write Protection Using Registry

Open your Registry Editor by entering the command regedit in Run (Windows+R).

Navigate to this path and create a new key named StorageDevicePolicies:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Under the key StorageDevicePolicies, create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it WriteProtect.

Double-click on the WriteProtect value and change its data to 1. Click “OK“.

2. Disable Write Access Using the Group Policy Editor

Open Run using the Windows+R keyboard shortcut and type in the command gpedit.msc. Hit Enter.

Navigate to: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Removable Storage Access

In right pane double-click on “Removable Disks: Deny write access”

Change the value to “Enabled“.

There you have it!

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below

Thanks for sharing in advance.