How to stop USB Mass Storage device in RHEL/CentOS

I’d like to disable all USB devices connected to our Red Hat Linux based workstations. I’d like to disable USB flash or hard drives, which users can use with physical access to a system to quickly copy sensitive data from it. How do I disable USB device support under RHEL/CentOS 5.x workstation operating systems. The USB storage drive automatically detects USB flash or hard drives. You can easily force and disable USB storage devices under any Linux distribution. The modprobe program used for automatic kernel module loading and can be configured to not load the USB storage driver upon demand. This will prevent the modprobe program from loading the usb-storage module, but will not prevent root (or another program) from using the insmod program to load the module manually.

In linux it’s even more easily done, by unloading the usb_storage module: for disable :-

# modprobe -r usb_storage

for enable :-

# modprobe -i usb_storage
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The easiest way to disable usb storage device in linux is create following file And add following line inside the file

# touch /etc/modprobe.d/no-usb

install usb-storage /bin/true

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Grub option

You can get rid of all USB devices by disabling kernel support for USB via GRUB. Open grub.conf or menu.lst (Under Debian / Ubuntu Linux) and append “nousb” to the kernel line as follows:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.1.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ console=tty0 console=ttyS1,19200n8 nousb

Save and close the file. Once done just reboot the system:

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Type the following command:

# echo ‘install usb-storage : ‘ >> /etc/modprobe.conf

You can also remove USB Storage driver, enter:

# ls /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/usb/storage/usb-storage.ko

# mv /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/usb/storage/usb-storage.ko /root