How to make the USB ports accessible to Windows Guests in virtualbox hosts on Unbutu

I tried running windows XP inside a virtual machine and found out that I cannot access the USB port from within the VM. To fix this I had to make sure that my username belonged to the vboxusers group with the command

Execute sudo usermod -G vboxusers -a <username>

then I had to set VBOX_USB=USBFS VirtualBox in the virtual box configuration