Security Experts: Avoid Windows for on-line Financial Transactions

More and more security experts are recommending that people avoid the use of Windows in any form when performing on-line financial transactions. Some experts say this is even more important for businesses than consumers because businesses have less time under the law to identify and report fraud.

Brian Krebs, the computer security expert for the Washington Post says in an October 9, 2009 Blog post:

An investigative series I’ve been writing about organized cyber crime gangs stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses has generated more than a few responses from business owners who were concerned about how best to protect themselves from this type of fraud.

The simplest, most cost-effective answer I know of? Don’t use Microsoft Windows when accessing your bank account online.

He goes on to say that businesses, and presumably the rest of us as well, should use a “live CD” version of Linux to transact any type of financial business on the web because that is the only way to avoid the Windows Malware that steals your ID and your money.

Read the complete post. I won’t post the details here, because you can read the entire blog entry for yourself, but it seems that in one case thieves had hacked into the Windows computer of the bank controller in order to steal access codes.

How safe can your Windows computer be if an allegedly secure one belonging to a bank can be cracked so easily?

In Australia, the New South Wales police are recommending that consumers use Linux for on-line banking. Again they recommend using a Linux boot up disk or USB thumb drive to perform on-line financial transactions.

The reason? Linux is secure.

Complete Solution

I wonder why these experts only recommend using a Linux on a Live boot disk for financial transactions. Why not just move to Linux completely? Is the rest of your data, especially for businesses, not as important as your financial transactions? If you keep your accounting data on a Windows computer, your product designs, your marketing plans, emails discussing projects and potential projects with your customers, does that data not need to be protected as well?

Of course it does.

I recommend gong all the way with a complete security solution. Use Linux from beginning to end. Use Linux on your computers all the time. If you have one or two critical applications for which there are no Linux replacements and you must use Windows to run them, I recommend only running Windows as a guest in a virtual machine on a host computer running Linux.

Use Linux for a complete end-to-end, full time solution to keeping your data — all of your data — safe.

You might also want to find out what your bank is doing to keep your account information safe.

Thanks to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols whose original blog post at ITWorld, “Windows unsafe for online banking? Shopping?” led me to this information.

Monopoly

No, not the board came, but the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft.

No Choices

Aside from any questions of whether you would want to or not, have you ever tried to purchase a computer with any operating system other than Windows? Even if you don’t need to buy a new computer, go to a store like Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot or even a local computer retail store such as (in Raleigh, NC) Intrex. Ask the sales person for a computer that has a different operating system than Windows. Watch the faces and see the incredulity and even disdain.

The first problem is that there are only a couple, and only one is for PCs. One is Apple’s MAC OS and the other is Linux. Of course you can go to an Apple store to get a computer with MAC OS. The other is Linux. Linux and MAC OS are very closely related. You have to have a MAC to run MAC OS, but you can run Linux on any PC. So there are not many choices in the first place which is always the sign of a monopoly.

The second problem is that virtually all computers come with Windows already installed. You might be able to purchase a computer with Linux installed from Dell or HP, but probably only on their web sites and with a very limited set of hardware on which they will install it. You cannot just go to the store and purchase a computer with anything but Windows on it. The best you could possibly do is to purchase a computer without any operating system at all from a place like Intrex and install one yourself.

So you essentially have no choices for an operating system when you go to a store to purchase a computer. This is a monopoly. The same is true for applications. Try to purchase a copy of any office software other than Microsoft Office. You cannot because it is not there.

For this discussion it is irrelevant that Microsoft itself is responsible for this lack of choices. They will tell you that their software is the most popular in the world. Like they got elected prom queen when no one else ran against them is popularity. Do you see the problem here?

The Microsoft plan for world domination works like this:
Sell software, such as Office, that reads old formats and only writes new ones (or at least write new ones only if you know a magic incantation). You can do anything you want with your new software.  People send you things, you do what you like with them.

When you send something back, people have trouble using it with their old software.  They snarl at you and tell you to learn the magic incantation.  After a while, they get tired of snarling, especially since it usually doesn’t work, and they give up and buy the new software.

But the key is, when you buy the new software, it has to do everything you want so you don’t badmouth the new stuff and go back to using the old stuff yourself.  It has to be the people with the old stuff that give up and buy the new stuff. Of course this didn’t go according to plan with Vista.

Open Source Freedom

With Open Source Software there are many choices available and they all play nicely together. For example there are three primary office suites for Linux, OpenOffice, GnomeOffice and KOffice. There are others as well and also a good number of stand-alone word processors and spreadsheets. The best part is that they all adhere to open standards such as the Open Document Standard which allows them to be used interchangeably with any given set of documents. With Microsoft you cannot even use your current word processor with a document from the next one. In fact, some of this Open Source Software even runs on Windows.

All of these Open Source word processors offer better compatibility with older Microsoft Word documents and even other word processors such as WordPerfect. The rectors at our church had seventy or eighty old WordPerfect documents when they moved to our church that they could not use with Word. OpenOffice allowed them to access these documents for the first time in several years.

And of course all of these Open Source office programs and suites are not only free as in speech, they are free as in beer. So if you do have to upgrade because your old version of StarOffice won’t open the latest OpenOffice documents, it does not cost you any money.

Let Millennium Technology Consulting LLC show you how easy it is to make the transition to Linux and Open Source Software. We can also provide training to assist in making the transition. We do Open Source and Linux consulting for small to medium businesses.