Last few weeks there have been numerous reports of various hacks, tools, apps, malwares, privacy policy violation that etc that make it easy to steal our identity, gain access to our personal information, or to otherwise profile and compartmentalize us.
This relentless assault on safely and security of online browsing, let me to device an scheme that would help me feel somewhat secure in this insecure world. Here is the idea. I would love your feedback or to know more about how you make online experience more secure.
I divide my online browsing into 4 major categories:
- Sites where I do financial transactions My Bank, Broker, Credit card provider etc.
- General Browsing News Sites, Various Blogs, Online research, where I dont have enter a password.
- Sites which know a lot about me These sites are usually protected by password Mail, social sites.
- Hi Risk sites Shady sites which I know try hard to install malware.
My major concern was that one “bad” or a “poorly” implemented site should not compromise other sites or my computer. If a site is inherently unsafe, or easily hijackable or breachable, It should not give the keys to the kingdom to the hackers.
My plan essentially involves using a different browser for each of the above categories with some simple rules. All the major browsers are free and they are keeping up with each other. Specially since IE has caught up . I have 3 different browsers installed and I use all of them.
Financial sites : I use following rules. you should only ever have one financial sites open at a time. Use a clean browser to open the site. The browser used for financial purposes should not be used for anything else. Its ONLY used for conducting a financial transactions, that too only one site at a time. I never remember passwords, use “incognito/private browsing” for visiting these sites, so that I am not impacted by cookies etc. I use Safari for this.
General browsing : This is how I browse the web. I have a separate browser for general browsing. This browser needs to be fast, capable of syncing bookmarks and fun to use. This where I spend most of my time. I use chrome for this.
Social sites : I use firefox for this. These sites specially facebook and twitter try to “track” the browsing habit, I make it a point to do my main browsing on a different browser all togather. I don’t do single signon or connect my friends from one social network to another. eg. Dont give facebook the password for gmail, yahoo etc. and have them access my mails etc. No matter what their privacy policy says, they all have rotten apples.
Suspect/unsafe sites : These are the riskiest sites. I browse them on a “dedicated disposable computer”, or a virtual machine, never on the main computer ever. I use firefox and use its various plugins to asses the risk and minimize the impact.
The main idea for this process is to make sure that one shady site should not compromise my browser or my computer and thus hack into other sites that I do business with.
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