DEDICATED PC for Online Banking

Bill and I often pass newsletters and articles back and forth. We recently shared one with our Vice President of Finance, Amy Hart Ramey. It was about the alerts issued by the FBI and the American Banking Association suggesting that businesses use a dedicated PC for any online banking.


There are several articles and blogs on the topic. We discussed the “areas of exposure”. Most businesses are concerned about viruses, so they have protection. The bigger percent of exposure is linked to how secure your business surf controls are. If an employee is surfing the internet they may inadvertently download a worm or virus or may open the door for hackers to install keystroke loggers that your anti-virus may not pick up.

As a business owner, it is important to understand your bank’s position on the topic. Many banks will not accept any liability for fraudulent transfers if they determine that you were negligent in your online banking security measures including but not limited to a well-configured firewall and current anti-virus programs, or dedicated PC.

The core requirements to keep in mind are:

1. The PC should be dedicated and should only be used to link to the banking website

2. The PC should have no email access

We had a situation in our office where an employee visited a church website not knowing that it had a virus and it was showing up as a “malicious site” because of the virus. Thankfully we had our current anti-virus software running. And, we’ve instated a dedicated PC for online banking.

This was Amy Hershman’s last conversation with Bill Taylor and Amy Hart Ramey.