Recently I bought a Seagate Freeagent Go portable USB drive which has the ability to load portable applications onto the drive. From what I read, it seems that this allows applications to be run from the drive rather than the host computer. I plan to use this overseas for internet banking. Can you advise whether this would be safe? For example, could I use this in an internet cafe or hotel computer without being at risk of spyware, or should I load software like Spybot onto the drive?

As you have mentioned, particular USB drives can have special software (such as Ceedo and U3) which allow portable applications to be run directly from the drive, without a need to have the application installed on the local computer. This can be quite convenient, as you can take portable copies of software such as web browsers (e.g. Firefox) with all your favourites and history, without the worry of using a public web browser which may be capturing information about your internet usage on the local public computer. However, just because you are using a portable application does not mean you are safe, and I would certainly not recommend you complete transactions such as internet banking using any public computer, even if using a portable application.

The portable application, let’s take the Firefox web browser for example, simply allows you to use that program on the computer. So, you may use your portable Firefox to access your internet banking. However, the portable application is still running on-top of the local public computer’s operating system. Therefore, any nasties on the local computer will still affect you, even when using a portable application. For example, if there is a key logger loaded onto the public computer even when using your portable Firefox to access your internet banking site your keystrokes will still be recorded by the key logger, as the key strokes you type into the keyboard need to go through the public computer operating system before reaching the portable Firefox application which you are running.

Loading software such as Spybot onto your portable hard drive will have limited usefulness. While you could use this utility to scan the public computer for any malware, this could take quite a while to complete and is also not guaranteed to detect and/or remove all malware found on the computer. Therefore, I would strongly recommend against using any public computer to conduct internet banking or other types of sensitive transactions which require secure credentials (username and passwords) to access. Instead, I would recommend that you take your own laptop computer and use the paid broadband internet access available at most hotels. In fact, many hotels now offer complementary broadband access. This is much safer, as you are using your own computer and people should not be able to snoop on your network traffic, assuming you are using secure (HTTPS) websites for all internet based transactions.