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Thinking about setting up a dedicated "secure PC" in my house.. Thoughts?
housetier:
There is a dedicated linux distribution for home banking and similar sensitive tasks. Bankix is supposed to boot from CDROM and won't write to hard disks. The instructions are in German though...
40hz:
Do it. I do. :Thmbsup:
If you have your system set up with swappable hard drives drives, you could also give your financial and other hyper-personal stuff its own drive and not need a separate box. If you're like most people, you're probably not accessing your financial info so often that doing a drive swap would be all that inconvenient.
While you're at it, why not also set up second a machine (real or virtual) and use that exclusively for all your other web browsing and email. That way you confine all your major online risks to that one machine.
And for absolute overkill, you could also use one of the secure 'live' NIX distros. Just boot from that for general purpose web use. Just like a virtual machine - only geekier! ;)
Ahhh...options! Gotta love it. ;D
<EDIT: whoops! houstier beat me to it! :Thmbsup:>
f0dder:
Sounds like a good idea, mouse-man.
Get a netbook, set up a non-admin account on it, and indeed go for TrueCrypt FDE in case the machine is stolen.
basementjack:
I like the idea!
I had been thinking of doing something similar.
I planned to use some form of linux that was bootable from CD.
My dlink router shows all open connections to the network, so it would be easy enough to see if it opened any back doors.
For the ultra paranoid, you could plug it into a hub then sniff the traffic on a second PC and watch what was happening.
OldElmerFudd:
When the IT Dept gets rid of computers they either trash the hard drive and throw them away or give them to a recycling computer company to hipe the HD and resell them. You should look into it.
-stitched (September 27, 2009, 03:16 AM)
--- End quote ---
Check Tiger Direct for off-lease deals. Best I've found.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/
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