How to Completely Disable ‘USB Tethering’ on Android

USB Tethering allows you to share your Android smartphone’s cellular data connection with a desktop or laptop computer by plugging it in with a USB cable. While this is an excellent backup solution for rural internet outages, it is a severe data security risk in corporate environments. An employee can connect their personal phone to a highly secure, air-gapped corporate workstation and instantly bridge that machine to the unfiltered, unmonitored cellular internet, completely bypassing the corporate firewall and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS).

This guide explains how to completely disable the USB Tethering feature on an Android smartphone to prevent network bridging.

Disable USB Tethering via Developer Options

Because USB tethering relies on low-level USB configuration protocols (specifically RNDIS), we must disable the default networking behaviour via Android’s hidden Developer Options menu.

1. First, ensure Developer Options are enabled (Settings > About phone > Tap “Build number” seven times).
2. Open the main Settings app on your Android smartphone.
3. Scroll down and tap on System.
4. Tap on Developer options.
5. Scroll down to the “Networking” section.
6. Locate the setting labelled Default USB configuration and tap on it.
7. By default, it may be set to “File Transfer” or “No data transfer.” Ensure it is NOT set to “USB tethering.”
8. If you are deploying a fleet of devices via a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution like Microsoft Intune or VMware Workspace ONE, you must apply a Device Restriction policy that sets DISALLOW_USB_FILE_TRANSFER and DISALLOW_CONFIG_TETHERING to true. This is the only way to permanently grey out the UI toggle for standard users.

Verify the Lockdown

For standard users attempting the local configuration, the default USB state is now decoupled from the networking stack.

To verify the restriction, plug the Android smartphone into a Windows or Mac computer using a data-capable USB cable. Navigate to Settings > Network & internet > Hotspot & tethering on the Android device. If you are using an MDM profile to enforce the lockdown, the “USB tethering” toggle switch will be completely greyed out and unclickable, displaying a message that the setting is managed by your organization. The workstation will only receive power from the device and will not recognize a new network adapter, keeping your corporate network strictly isolated.