Don't use Windows for Internet Banking

Came across this must read article, which I thought is a must share when we live, connect, commerce so much online these days. The article (dated 08 Oct 09) stems from deposition by the New South Wales Police, Australia during a public hearing on Cybercrime  and can be found here.

The article is rather simplistic as it does not goes into technical details, but does drives home the point. The recommendation to use Linux clean boot or using iPhone is pretty sensible and recommended.

An extract of the article:

" Cybercrime expert endorses Linux, iPhone when banking online.

Consumers wanting to safely connect to their internet banking service should use Linux or the Apple iPhone, according to a detective inspector from the NSW Police, who was giving evidence on behalf of the NSW Government at the public hearing into Cybercrime today in Sydney.

Detective Inspector Bruce van der Graaf from the Computer Crime Investigation Unit told the hearing that he uses two rules to protect himself from cybercriminals when banking online. The first rule, he said, was to never click on hyperlinks to the banking site and the second was to avoid Microsoft Windows."

Of course I don't use Microsoft Windows - simply see no sense in spending good money on a legal copy - when I can do all my work (including word processing, presentations, graphics, multimedia) and more in my Linux distributions - Ubuntu (home use) and Debian (Office use).

We need to be much more careful and aware and consider this startling statistics, (thank your stars if you are not already a victim):

"Symantec has release a report indicating that cyber crime has surpassed illegal drug trafficking as a criminal moneymaker, and 1 in 5 will become a Victim." - from this site

And in case you are using Internet Explorer (any versions!!), the default Web-browser in your Windows OS, please do yourself a favour and switch right now. The IE browsers are bloated, slow, insecure, and doesn’t render the web correctly. Check out this BLOG on why Internet Explorer 8 sucks!! and this website on Why Internet Explorer is unsafe. Though IE8 has improved a lot (check here - read the comments too), it still has some way to go (wait for IE9???). Also do yourselves another favour and learn/be-aware about modern, standards-compliant browsers.

Though I am a big fan of Firefox (it is extensible with excellent add-ons, secure, and Open Source), you can try out other light-weight browsers too like Opera, Camino (on Mac OS), Chrome etc. Here is a long list of web-browsers!!