MS Money... safe?

[Bodine]

I've been doing online banking for a couple years. Basically just checking balances and transferring funds b/t accounts, etc. Now my wife has setup MS Money and wants to use it to cramp my styl... err... put us on a budget. I didn't have a problem with that until I found out that she wants to store my account numbers and login/passwords on her computer. I assumed she was going to plug our paycheck amounts in and it would assume those numbers were correct, but apparently MS Money downloads acct. balances and transactions from the banks itself. Over a wireless connection, as well.

I haven't been uncomfortable with the online banking b/c nothing was stored on my computer. Once I logged out there was nothing a virus could grab. But not sure how I feel about storing those in software -- especially M$ sofware.

Am I being paranoid. Is MS Money secure?

 

[Bob151]

I can speak for version 2003 and prior.

I have been doing MS Money since 1997 online, banking tie-ins, all that stuff. It has been great. The connetions are SSL based I believe. If not, I can't believe a bank would even agree to it.

Paying bill, balancing accounts, planning, budgetting, its not that hard.

But, of course, you have a hardware firewall between you and the internet doing NAT and Statefull Packet Inspection, right? Plus anti-spyware to look for the key loggers, and a virus scanner.....

Added.....

MS Money 2004 and above use something called Yodlee and it has introduced many problems it seems based on feedback on the MS Money forums. Some have said that your data is stored on other service providers servers, this I do not know if its true or not. Maybe someone here could dispute this.

If you're starting from scratch, you might want to consider Quicken.

 

[Bodine]

Thanks. I do have a NAT firewall, but I'm not sure what "stateful packet inspection" is. Is that common in 802.11G home routers (I have a Linksys wrt54g v3). I looked in the linksys config but didn't see that as a setting.

 

[Bob151]

SPI is very common in today's firewalls. One's from the 90's, might not have had it. Basically, it monitors outgoing connection attempts and only permits replies from the source IP and port address from the internet. I would bet that the linksys does that, you might not even be able to turn it off as it is very common now.

Wireless... make sure that you don't setup windows shares loosely.

I think your most imortant thing in securing money files is to make sure that your own PC is pretty secure. You have a firewall, good. Run spyware and virus scanners very frequently if not on all the time. I also have a password interlaced with numbers on the money file (this is internal to the program), although I am sure since it is microsoft's product someone has writen a password "recovery" program for it.