How do you connect a keyboard or mouse?
The keyboard and mouse were connected to a dock.
On the OS level only HID devices were allowed via USB you could bypass this if you had admin rights but it would leave a trail.
The idea behind these like most other security controls is to prevent accidental leakage and to make it difficult enough that intentional leakage would likely be detecte on time.
A move I've seen being put in place at several locations, is removing local admin rights from all users. Those with advanced needs, like developers, gets a VM which is limited to a specific VLAN, with no access to the production environments.
The principle is sound, implementation is ... difficult, to say the least.
With a few exceptions it's much easier to either poach your competitors or simply buy them outright which is why "corporate espionage" is mainly employed by nation states these days that need to catch up. It's also important to note that stealing a design isn't that useful these days since you are too far gone what would be more important especially in the semi industry is to know the characteristics of a specific design or process in order to be able to preemptively position your offerings to compete without giving up any unnecessary ground.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/sec...
Example of an actual implementation in the wild: https://uit.stanford.edu/service/paw
The only machines that can actually SSH into prod at least have screen-session-recording software, perhaps are kept in a separate room, with a policy of two staff present at all times. The general idea is that the closer you actually get to being able to bypass the checks and controls, the more attention you bring to yourself and your errand.
Yes, it can't be Git and Puppet all the way down, at some point someone will necessarily have access to do something as root on the server that hosts the Git repo that Puppet runs from. But instead of that being every dev on every laptop anywhere in the world, you can make sure it's a very small group of people, from a small number of workstations.
This is difficult and requires a substantial and very competent team to implement correctly.
In a restricted environment you will have several monitoring agents that track and enforce system integrity.
Of course that's enough to run malware. Just inject Win+R, cmd, enter, <your shell code here>
On restricted workstations even if you can run command prompt which isn’t guaranteed it won’t lead to anything.
The usb port restriction is absolutely true for laptops, but colo desktops probably do not have this restriction, or just a more lax restriction. Also, its not true for all laptops of the company, but usb access does require explicit permissions and a new-issue laptop, so they do have a list of people who have riskier laptops, and may need to be issued a different travel laptop vs engineering laptop.
The laptop's epoxied ports likely prevent distracted traveling workers from having their laptops hacked with usb-keys inserted when they aren't looking.
You cannot access anything besides the power button.
(Edit: Haven't --> Can't)
A docking station usually has a lot more than just USB ports. Mine has three monitor connections, more USB ports than the laptop itself, a power connection, and an RJ-45 jack. One of the benefits is the expanded number of connectors. Another benefit is that I don't have to unplug half a dozen items to take the laptop with me; I just hit the eject button and pick the laptop up. In the same way, reconnecting all that stuff is achieved by just plopping the laptop onto the dock.
Best of both worlds: Portability of the laptop itself, and the easy expansion of the laptop's capabilities in situations where the expansion is useful (e.g. somewhere that I can keep a bunch of big monitors, and would benefit from a non-mobile work area).