onlyreplyhereplease@isp.com

[Guest_imported]

We keep a lot of financial information on our home PC. And in our case, some of it is fairly sensitive, and some of it is tied to our financial investments. I've started to wonder if we should only keep our information elsewhere. As an example, is it safer to use the worksheets and other financial tools offered by a site like ebondusa.com and store all bond investment information there, since financial websites must be extremely secure, or is it safer to keep things on our home PC but investigate some high-tech solution, maybe a firewall. Are personal firewalls easy to get, easy to manage? Are they successful? Joe

 

[hnd]

As a personal Firewall I use Zonealarm. It can be downloaded from

http://www.zonelabs.com.

The Installation and Setup makes no problems.

It seems to be reliable.


hnd
hasso55@yahoo.com

 

[Alt255]

Network Ice makes another called Black Ice (my favorite for home use). It's warded off countless intrusions and I can't imagine going on-line without it.

BTW, it's still good common sense to disable file sharing and keep your sensitive data on an encrypted drive. Just don't forget the password!

http://www.vorpalcom.com

 

[ackka]

To tell you the truth i would be more worried about losing that data, through device failures, viruses etc.. than a security risk. Use both services, both your home PC for some stuff, and a finacial site for some other. Large servers that store large amounts of information are relatively secure, but.... they are always on, making it easy for consistent attacks, they have set security routines which can be figured out.... I would say take this approach....

Use your home computer for really delicate stuff
use a finacial server for everyday stuff and backups.
Use PGP to encrypt the data when you store it
make sure your home computer has a good virus protection, a personall firewall is a good idea, also backup,backup,backup,backup...
a zip drive would be a good idea for backups...

Their are also severeal good books on genereal data security, i cannot think of any titles of hand, just look in the library....

good luck

ackka
tmoses@iname.com

http://home.cyberarmy.com/ackka

"Do No Harm, Leave No Tracks"

ICMP Summer 2000, 2600 Article

 

[Guest_imported]

People usually choose to protect their own computers. Firewalls are easy enough to install. Usually it's the web sites that hackers are trying to get into anyway. Though, not all of them. The personal information you would
share with eBondUSA wouldn't be very valuable. How much money you've recently spend on munis, and which munis you think are good investments is not going to interest the average hacker the way your bank account will. What you need to keep safe are you credit card numbers, your SSN, your passwords, things that can unlock the door to acount information that can be used against you.
Jen