Full Scan Removable Drives should be enabled

Contributed by Boris Drogja with Olugbenro OgundipeAll contributors →

Part of Maester · Defender · Endpoint antivirus · All checks

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Invoke-Maester -TestId MT.1154

Overview

Verify that full scan of removable drives is enabled to mitigate USB risks.

Disabled removable drive scanning allows USB-based malware infections.

Remediation action:

1. Open Microsoft Endpoint Manager > Endpoint Security > Antivirus
2. Edit the relevant Microsoft Defender Antivirus policy
3. Enable Allow Full Scan on Removable Drives

If your antivirus settings are split across several policies, this setting only needs to be set in one of them, as long as that policy is assigned to every device that needs it. No other assigned policy should set a different value: Intune does not merge this setting, so a device that receives both values may end up with either one, or none.

Related links

• Policy merge and conflicts for Antivirus policy settings
• Configure Microsoft Defender Antivirus
• Microsoft Endpoint Manager

Details

Every attribute of this check

Field	Value
Test ID	MT.1154
Severity	Medium
Suite	Maester
Product	Defender
Related products	Intune
Feature	Endpoint antivirus
Area	Devices and endpoints
Resource type	Policy
User impact	Low
Implementation cost	Low
MITRE ATT&CK	T1091 Replication Through Removable Media
Supports controls	nist-800-53-r5:SI-3
PowerShell test	Test-MtMdeRemovableDriveScanning
Services	Graph

Source

• Test: tests/maester/defender/Test.MT.1154.ps1
• Documentation: tests/maester/defender/Test.MT.1154.md