Windows Security and On-line Training Courses?

eggegick writes "My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I'd have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don't think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view. Myself, I use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old Windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge, I've never had a virus or malware problem. Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and at this point she feels her computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers. Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have for running this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is, have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?)."

Comments

Re:Virtualization is your friend, and also ...

[omb]

Anything that lets Active X run, eg a Windows OS is an un-containable security risk. By that I mean that if you have a system that allows that stuff to run you have __NO__ security in that Logical Partition, and you have to be able to sacrifice the Image and start over.

Lots of (a) disk space, (b) care and organization are necessary. As others have said use virtualizarion, preferably over a Linux kernel even if you never use linux per se as it makes the virtual LPARs easier to manage and has an effective firewall, even with iptables off, at startup for most distributions. I use OpenSuSE.

The game-script is choose a virtualization, lots, mostly free, try to avoud things like VmWare unless you really need its features, Install basic Linux eg Ubantu, install VM manager, install Windows (1) on a real HD partition and (2) for its virtual environment. Burn CD/DVD of the Windows setup, install extensions, courseware ... burn another DVD, turn on the 'tun' network to windows.

You are now in roughly the position most large corporate Windows users establish, you have glass 'Ghostlike' images of you setup as it was before you entered the unsafe-sex world of Windows, and you can quickly step back to them.

Corporate speak "re Image your machine".

Dont forget it ifconfig the tun down before you let anything get at your image. The MTTP (Mean Time ti Pawned) is c
3 mins for an un-protected Win box on the internet.