protecting financial information

[Guest_imported]

sorry about the double post-- I am new at participating in forums--my question
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]

I can guess you 2 steps:

1. keep actual backups outside of your computer room (Fire, Burglary....)

2. Encrypt the data, suggest PGP



hnd
hasso55@yahoo.com

 

[chenn]

Apart from backing up your financial data (encrypted) you should consider not connecting your box to any kind of network. As you are probably using Windows-OS you should disconnect your modem or use a standalone computer for data concerns. My experiences with personal firewalls are really bad, as even the user-friendly versions allow too may misconfigurations.
regards
chenn

 

[DarkShad]

It is my opinion if you keep any financial infomation on-line, you should consider managing the information on your own system, and using redundant back-up processes, but most of all consider using Black Ice Defender program. It is cheap and effective and in testing the programs out performed leading intrusion detection software. You may visit their site at

http://advice.networkice.com

and view the program documentation here:

http://advice.networkice.com/Docs/BlackICE_Def_UG_21.pdf

 

[chiph]

Joseph -

What Chenn said is absolutely correct. If you've got a broadband connection of some kind, or even you stay dialed-up with your modem for long periods, you need to remove the Windows networking (NetBEUI protocol). A good site that demonstrates your vulnerabilities (safely!) is Steve Gibson's at

http://grc.com

(no

http://www).

Follow the link for "Shields Up".

Chip H.

 

[MasterRacker]

According to Gibson's LeakTest, ZoneAlarm gets the best score, even over BlackIce.

Jeff
masterracker@hotmail.com

If everything seems to be going well: you don't have enough information.......