Dual boot, OS clean install, but still icons from other OS appear.

Neil_Jones

justaquestion wrote: »

Thanks for that, I am somewhat surprised though that to date the banks have not invented some way of totally isolating the banking environment from the general net.

They don't need to, there is a "fraud guarantee" in place on all the banks that basically says if fraud happens on your account while using their online services and it can be proved that you weren't negligible with your logon details then you'll get the money back.

And there is such a thing as "isolation" in the way you describe - its called Tor. but because of the way Tor works you log into the bank with it and you'll probably get no end of "security incidents" for it.

I do use trusteer report as recommended by the banks, but the thought has crossed my mind that somehow sooner or later a massive security hole might arise in it, and could be exploited by hackers to capture all your login details.

Trusteer is crap and has been for a while, most banks don't actively push it now, it causes more problems with the browser than it claims to apparently solve. As for security hole, see above.

But what can you do, only take the advice of the banks, run antivirus and hope for the best.

Where does it say in any banking paraphernalia "only access your account from a completely independent installation of Windows"? The banks spent a fortune doing the online banking thing and had the concept of security from the off, it wasn't something that was knocked up on the back of a fag packet in the pub one night or tacked on later.

I have used a live Linux DVD in the past just out of curiosity, so do you think that would work with all the banking sites in uk, and as it is a live DVD doesn't need antivirus etc?

It will (don't expect it to remember your logon details for obvious reasons) but that's still cracking a nut with a sledgehammer sort of solution.

I think you may be overestimating the security implications, 99.9% of all banking issues and/or fraud are caused not by the online banking but by things related to them - PayPal for example.

psychic_teabag

justaquestion wrote: »

I have used a live Linux DVD in the past just out of curiosity, so do you think that would work with all the banking sites in uk, and as it is a live DVD doesn't need antivirus etc?

I use linux for everything, including online banking, and have never had much trouble. (And I have accounts with many banks / BS.) Only iritating thing is that banks have in the past complained that my browser is not up to date, even though it is the latest one. I guess they're just matching it against what they expect from a windows browser. Hacking the user agent string worked. (But that was quite a while back now.)

Running from CD should reduce risk of virus between sessions, but of course that has the downside that it's harder to install security patches. It should be relatively simple to set up a system with the root and usr partitions mounted read-only, and writeable filesystems mounted with no execute permission, so that no executable code can be written to disk (except when you want to update them). Perhaps a little extreme for the typical user, though.

ETA: of course with scripts and things, the distinction between code and data does start to blur. Eg browser extensions and things wouldn't be considered executable at the OS level.