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Running your vm on encrypted vm drives makes any data on your computer unreadable unless you work for nsa/gchq ;-)
using very strong unguessable passwords is a must as im sure everyone here does... If anyone would like some help with creating strong passwords i have a good document that i typed up for that which i am happy to share.
How parranoid do you have to be to think you downloaded malware from debian stable repositories i don't know but i am pretty sure my vm is clean everytime i fire up the snapshot.
My only advice is... Do all your browsing/downloading through a vm snapshot. Move downloaded content to your file server which should be checking the content as soon as it is written to disk. Make secure but easy to remember passwords, notice passwords not password. Encrypt everything, be a TOR endpoint, back up your back ups, checksum and scan for virus' if you must but above all, dont worry be happy.
On Thu, 8 Aug 2013, Simon Avery wrote:
Running either Windows or Linux in a VM is not inherently more secure than running it on your main machine. I suppose you might argue that you have less software installed so
it's more secure, but that could be counter-argued with "one more system to keep up to date" - or rather, "One more system to forget to keep up to date"
Of course, running something inside a VM isn't more secure*. What would be more secure, and what I believe was being referred to, is setting up your OS once, taking a snapshot and then using that snapshot every time for online banking. Unless you managed to get yourself infected before you took the snapshot of course, but that's quite unlikely.
There's still a chance of malware running on the host system, or malware on another system that has managed to modify the router, performing some kind of man-in-the-middle attack, but using HTTPS properly makes this a pretty small risk.
As for anti-virus solutions, there are a handful of options. I don't know enough about this particular threat to be able to say whether they would have prevented it and I don't know about their effectiveness in general to make any recommendations.
* to hinder researchers, a lot of malware won't run if it detects it's being run inside a virtual environment. So in practise, running your OS inside a virtual environment makes you a little more secure. But you shouldn't assume it does.
Martijn.
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