on line banking advice

[nine mil thrill]

i currently do all of my on-line banking on a computer running Win7. this is a computer that is on only when banking, it gets used for nothing else. it is powered off until needed for bill pay.
my main computer is running Win10. i do everything on it.
my question......support for Win7 is ending. should I install Win8, or just start doing my financial on the Win10 ? how trustworthy is Win 10 for banking. should I get a new small computer with Win10 and just use it only for banking or go a new load on the old one ?

[Dragunov]

I'd go Win8.1Pro, with Classic Shell, on a Lenovo ThinkPad.

[Gooseman]

You really need to get away from Windows 7. Once Microsoft stops supporting it, it's open hunting season for all the hackers out there.

[ocabj]

In my work environment, the primary risks for the Windows users is phishing and malware. You'll be fine relatively speaking even if when 7 goes EOL. The risk is going to be user behavior on that host.

Stuff like Emotet is still being used as payloads and if you have a half decent anti-malware counter-measure to at least throw an alert if it lands on your computer, you should be fine.

From what I have observed, malicious actors using active attacks usually trying to compromise your financials further upstream to the actual service providers, either phishing your online banking creds or your employment / HR creds in order to redirect your direct deposit. Hopefully you have MFA enabled on all of your critical financial related online service accounts.

[ZenMasta]

It's impossible to know what's going to come out of the wood work as far as zero day exploits, once EOL comes.

Upgrade to windows 10. You can do it for less than 10 bucks on ebay. I can understand why people didn't want to switch to Windows 8 due to the drastic ui change. But windows 10 now having been out nearly 4 years, it works. IF all you're doing is casual online banking. Just upgrade so you always have security updates. If you hate the new start menu that badly, then just install classic shell.

If you do remain, I'd probably use limited non admin user account, in private browsing with no browser extensions.

[Memnon]

Why the paranoia?
If you put a value on your time from booting up and maintaining a dedicated machine, it outweighs the expected value of an incident.

[32spoke]

Why the paranoia?

If you put a value on your time from booting up and maintaining a dedicated machine, it outweighs the expected value of an incident.

For online banking, it is suggested to dedicate one computer for only this operation. I had an incident and it was:
Creepy
Upsetting
And no one wanted to investigate it.
Since that incident, I purchased a new computer and dedicated it for online banking, no internet surfing at all. Too much at stake for my business.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[nine mil thrill]

32spoke......that is exactly the situation i am in. this is a on-line banking only computer. i just wasn't sure if win 10 was trustworthy enough for only on line banking. i havn't heard enough about win 8 for security. hell ....i was even considering a new apple computer vs win 10.

[Bushwack44]

I've been using Win10 for online banking (3 major banks, stocks and mutual funds) w/o a problem. How much farther behind in the times do you want to be? You might as well give up on email and go back to pen and paper. Don't mean to be rude but either get on board or get off the electronic frontier.

[Memnon]

Makes sense to manage risk for a business. Strange that they didn't want to investigate it, that would suck for sure. Hope you were able to get it sorted out eventually.

[Turbinator]

Go ahead and move to Windows 10. I found out that I can buy legit Windows 10 licenses on ebay for super cheap - like $1.50. I was amazed, and since eBay has buyer protection, I bought 1 license to start. Worked great. Went back and bought a 2nd license, also been working great. Activation worked and everything. You have to download the Windows 10 disk image from MS, so make sure you have a good 'net connection to do this, but otherwise everything went off flawlessly. I'm never paying full price for an OS ever again.

Turby

[nine mil thrill]

i did do the upgrade to win 10. the reason for my concern was that win 10 has a lot of fluff running in the backround. someone here had something that you loaded up that set all of the settings in win 10 for privacy. i had it loaded once, and now i cant find it.

[the86d]

NEVER open a link in an e-mail from your bank and login... if you don't know how to tell if it is not really from your bank...

I don't know how many horror-stories I hear regarding people that lost money, and couldn't pay bills this way, second-hand, and they never got that money back...

[wpage]

If you are running avast or decent malware type program. OS makes no diference.

[high_revs]

OP,

do you keep your online banking pc on all the time? if not, that just reduces your risk even more. It would be helpful to know how you use it, i.e. just download from bank? pay bills online?

anything email related, use your regular pc or or another one so nothing gets on your banking PC.