Meltdown/Spectre - approach to online banking etc

jonathan183 · Guru Joined: 13 Dec 2011 Posts: 318

I was offline over the X-mas period and I'm just catching up with the Meltdown/Spectre issue.

It looks as though separate user accounts for sensitive things like online banking is not sufficient and that I will need to restart the PC for online banking and then restart the PC afterwards at least in the short term.

I see some virtualisation tools are affected, does this include VirtualBox? is the only way of reasonable security without lots of reboots for things like Firefox or Chrome/Chromium to run in a VirtualBox guest or does that not help either? chrome://flags and enabling strict site isolation might help for Chrome/Chromium

I used to be able to use links2 for online banking ... but the bank decided they needed java-script for basic functions :roll:

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

The #1 countermeasure to those CPU bugs is to not let untrusted code run on your computer in the first place - that means uMatrix or NoScript with whitelisting only. It goes without saying you should have an adblocker nowadays too.