online banking-is my pc more secure this way?

Genghis

ksrao wrote: »

I am using portable firefox with a flash memory.I will attach it to my comp.only when I do my banking and then remove and keep it safely.Do you think my internet banking is safe?

Probably not if thats your only form of security..

opportunity_cost

Genghis wrote: »

I'd stick to options 1 and 5. Don't rely to heavily on your antivirus. [...]

I'd say stick to Options 1, 2 and 5 at least.

Option 2, running a software firewall, is essential. Not just for the inbound protection that it offers (which many people already have if they connect to the internet via a router) but for the outbound protection that it gives you. A firewall will ask the user 'do you want to allow program x to connect to the internet?' so if someone does happen to run malware on their system, a firewall will be the last thing standing between a key logger sending information back to, say, someone wanting your financial details to wipe out your bank account or between a hacker gaining access to your computer.

Options 3 and 4 are not strictly necessary if you do scan every e-mail attachment manually before you download them and scan everything you download before trying to run/open the file you downloaded. But not everyone has the discipline to do that, so if they don't, they should have their anti-virus and anti-trojan resident protection running.

Aiadi

https://www.Sandboxie.com is what you need.

MonkeySaving?

I agree with Kingmonkey, you are being way way too paranoid here. Just make sure you have latest AV, a malware program of sorts and up to date Windows patches. As long as you're careful with what you click on with regards to e-mails etc you will be fine (even if Ghengis makes his virus it's more than likely to be picked up via heuristic tech)
Hell, i work as a senior it security consultant and you are going way overboard on the security on this one, trust me

amcluesent

>which necissitates me restarting my computer<

Sounds like hard work. Try the free Browser Appliance (Ubuntu/Firefox in a VMWare virtual machine). (Of course you could install XP on VMWare player too, but then you may have a greater risk of OS compromises than with Linux - no flames please:D )

Genghis

MonkeySaving? wrote: »

As long as you're careful with what you click on with regards to e-mails etc you will be fine (even if Ghengis makes his virus it's more than likely to be picked up via heuristic tech)

You would say heuristic analysis is an effective form of antivirus protection?
If someone writes a new virus that takes advantage of a new security flaw, and the virus doesn't do the classic virus-like things such as deleting files, then your antivirus software will not pick it up.

MonkeySaving? wrote:

you are going way overboard on the security on this one, trust me

Agreed.. but nothing wrong with going overboard on security.

MickMack

martin57 wrote: »

Yep thats a good idea about a separate hard disk that you plug in, and I can see this becoming the norm for online banking down the road, or else an internal disk not connected but switch to connect it quickly. Just as a matter of internest as my computer is fairly old with no usbs 2.0 does it take long to boot going the usb route?

martin57

For what its worth i think Martin is totally on the ball with this, as has already been said, Anti-virus and malware programs are always playing catchup with the latest and greatest and any extra measures to protect yourself against them can only be a good thing.

In reply to your questions Martin, if your pc is older and only has USB 1.1 then i would imagine the bootup and operation will be quite slow compared to the standard IDE connection. I would Imagine even USB2 is going to be slower but much much faster than USB1.1

What you can do is install USB ports on to your PC, this is fairly cheap and easy to do.

One concern i would have, with it being an older pc, is that the BIOS may not allow you to boot from a USB device (this is something you need to check out) if thats the case then a bootable version of Linux (as has already been suggested) such as KNOPPIX on a CD/DVD is another possible solution.