What is a USB Blocker?
To save, to connect, to share, to utilize – the USB port is to data what the faucet is to water, the commonplace focus for beginning. Even devices with FireWire connections are usually accompanied by USB adapters, because, without them, it would be like working in a second language – without knowing the language. No wonder the USB blocker is basic to securing your data networks and information systems. Considering the number of USB ports that surround us in the workplace, not protecting each one with a port blocker reminds some security specialists of opening every gate at an airport and not posting security checkpoints. They are that numerous and a great deal more active. How did USB become so universal, so nearly ubiquitous?
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard established in 1996 that set up protocols to organize and synthesize the connection, communication, and power supply interfaces for personal computers and their peripheral devices. Consider that date. It’s hard to recall now, but the idea that individual access to computing power – via personal computers – was not the “of course” that it is today, just a few years before the birth of USB. The reason the USB blocker is such a necessary element of computer security today is that computer access simply would not stay locked in the mainframe room of large corporations and computer service providers.
This World was Not Inevitable
The whole tide of history appeared to sweep computing power into the hands of nearly everyone when personal computers proved their competence. But even when people saw that personal, human-sized computers worked reliably, their adoption was nowhere near a cinch – and the idea that you needed a USB blocker wasn’t even being entertained. The idea that they would take over not only the home, but also the workplace, was even further from a walk-over. Scholars tell us that the hardest thing about history is to constantly remind yourself that outcomes like this were not pre-ordained. The way it turned out was no way inevitable. Certain sequences of events were necessary to bring about what happened in the explosion of personal computing, and some of those events were unlikely, to say the least.
One such unlikely turning point was the meeting in which two brash, young entrepreneurs – Bill Gates and Paul Allen – convinced IBM that the corporation once-synonymous with computing power would be missing the future if they stuck with mainframes and stayed out of personal computing. They succeeded in convincing the executives in that meeting, even though the two didn’t yet have an operating system for the PC design they were offering. The world that needs the USB blocker today was born from razor’s-edge turning points like that one.
Cost and custom were huge hurdles at first, too, because technology alone doesn’t re-shape human expectations and behavior, and yet today we don’t even remember overcoming them. It was so hard to imagine needing a personal computer at first – or a USB blocker for that matter – because people had done without them forever. What does it do? Why would I need that? The relative speed with which people changed their ways when they adopted personal computing is one of the most remarkable aspects of the story.
How to Get the USB Blocker
The physical vulnerabilities of the data networks on which we all depend are profound and fundamental. Whether the source is innocent or pernicious, the effect can be equally devastating, a disruption of the systems on which your business or operation or agency or enterprise depends for its very existence and function. USB ports and cable connectors are commonly left unsecured, inviting both contamination from well-meaning associates, and sabotage from hostile or predatory interests to enter at any time. Yet another example of perplexing paradox is that the answer is so simple, a USB blocker.
There’s no reason to carry on without the USB blocker on your side. Cost is not a serious obstacle, and that is yet another reason that this unguarded sector of the cybersecurity perimeter is so surprising. The inexpensive, unassuming looking, yet elegantly engineered USB blocker is so easy to acquire, deploy, and factor into your operation.
From The Connectivity Center, you’ll find the USB blocker for a price you might find hard to believe. Between their inexpensive nature and their near-universal need, we sometimes hear the suggestion that we sell them by the bushel. A color-coded USB blocker can offer you the opportunity to visually identify who is qualified to install and remove them from a given operation. For unlocking them, we offer two kinds of keys, the Enterprise and Professional series of the Smart Keeper USB Port Lock Key. Key patterns are strictly controlled, yet you can order duplicate keys to suit your own security authorization structure.
The Professional Series key offers you an ergonomic, retractable housing with anti-static rubber grip, LED light for low visibility work areas, and dual-retractors – main and peripheral – for access to any angle of installation. The Professional Series provides effective control to reach USB blockers in confined spaces.
At The Connectivity Center, our mission is to protect the ports and connectors that guard the physical points of entry that that turn computers into data networks and information systems. Our Link Lock connectors, the Link Lock Hub, and a variety of locking 4K high-speed cables secure ubiquitous USB ports and network connections, and also lock your devices so that they cannot be removed without authorized access.
Our Smart Keeper collection of computer and laptop security devices protect the vital data network connections that empower your information systems and still permit the controlled access that moves your enterprise forward day after day.
Think of all the essential devices that make up your information system, and you’ll know what to do. At The Connectivity Center, our perspective for cybersecurity reaches back to the beginnings of widespread computer access. Securing the open front door of cybersecurity – the physical points of access – is what we do; one simple way we do it by offering affordable USB blockers.
