A technician wants to disable USB ports on the server to prevent booting from a flash drive. Which of the following actions should the technician take to accomplish this task?

BIOS/UEFI firmware controls hardware initialization and the boot device sequence before any operating system is loaded, making it the only layer capable of preventing USB boot media from being recognized. Disabling USB ports or removing USB from the boot order in BIOS setup is enforced at the hardware level and persists regardless of OS state. Setting a BIOS administrator password in addition ensures unauthorized users cannot re-enable the USB boot option.

Device Manager disables USB ports within the running OS, but it has no effect during the pre-boot phase when a USB device could still be selected as a boot medium.

Control Panel is an OS-level tool that manages Windows settings and cannot control hardware boot behavior that occurs before Windows initializes.

UAC (User Account Control) is a Windows privilege elevation mechanism that manages application permission prompts and has no relationship to USB hardware control or boot security.