How to be Safer While Banking Online
SANS.edu (PDF) and Brian Krebs' Security Fix article entitled Avoid Windows Malware: Bank on a Live CD (Washington Post) recommend that Windows users should use a Live CD like Knoppix or Ubuntu to access their online banking.
With so many companies being targeted by online criminal hackers - and so many high dollar successes - using a non-Windows and CD based, non-installed operating system that totally goes away on the next boot just makes perfect sense.
The main reason a LiveCD is great for online banking is because you are loading a read-only CD which boots Linux (non-Windows) operating system. It does not touch the hard drive with your Windows operating system on it at all.
In addition, even if your Windows operating system is totally infected with malware (malicious software including keyloggers, Trojans, backdoors or viruses, etc.), the malware does not load and can't hurt you when you do your online banking when booting from a Live CD. It is totally isolated. When you are done, just remove the CD and restart the computer into Windows as usual.
More at Brian Krebs' Security Fix here.
