We’re here to help you take your first step into BankVault Business. Here’s how to get started.

3 things about how BankVault Business works

1. Start with the PC Completely ‘Off’

   Before booting into BankVault your PC must be completely powered down. (‘Sleep’ won’t work. You’ll need to be totally powered OFF.)

2. System Requirements: PC hardware and Internet via cable

   For security reasons BankVault does not support WiFi as it is known to have many security issues and is relatively easy to hack. Your computer will need a cable connection with access to the Internet.

3. Do Not reformat your BankVault key

   Never allow Microsoft Windows to REFORMAT your BankVault key. If you do, you will render that key inoperable (e.g., forever broken), and you’ll need us to ship you another, brand-new key.

Step-by-step instructions

BankVault Business will use your existing computer hardware to build a temporary operating system that lasts for the duration of your online transaction. It does not change or affect anything on your device. The procedure requires you first shutdown your PC completely, insert your BankVault Key and power on, booting off the BankVault Key instead of your normal hard disk. Your normal power up process has to be paused using an Interrupt keystroke, and the actual keystroke will vary from one PC to another. The instructions below are a guideline to the most common PC manufacturers. If you are not comfortable with the instructions then please contact your PC support technician or the BankVault Help Desk to guide you.

Troubleshooting
PC's manufactured after 2012 have a BIOS setting called "Fast Boot" enabled. You may want to disable Fast Boot in your BIOS to allow enable booting from USB.

If you're unable to boot into BankVault then please contact our Help Desk.

1. Power OFF your PC and then insert your BankVault Key.

2. Power ON your PC and ...

   • Acer
   • Apple
   • Asus
   • Dell
   • HP
   • Lenovo
   • Samsung
   • Toshiba
   • Other

   ... press the "F12" key twice a second until a list of boot device options appear.

   Note: Sometimes the Boot Options interrupt key will display on your screen as soon as the PC is turned on. Alternatively you can enter the BIOS and navigate to the Boot Device Options. Your model may use a different interrupt key, for example: F2 or F9 or F10 or Esc.

   Note: If your PC continues to boot into Windows then your computers BIOS might be configured for “Fast Boot” which bypasses the initial check of peripherals such has USB and DVD. Please disable Fast Boot. Your PC consultant can do this, or alternatively contact our Help Desk to guide you.

   Reference: Click here

    

3. Select 'boot from the USB device' (sometimes labelled Silicon Power). It will take about 15 seconds to boot and create your new BankVault login machine.

4. Login to your BankVault account. Launch one of the web browsers and use it as you would normally use a web browser.

5. To shut down press "Start", "Log off" and select “Terminate”. You can reboot your normal PC by pressing the power or restart buttons.

6. Restarting your normal PC: Power on your computer to reboot your computer. If you changed and saved your BIOS preferences to boot from USB first (see below) then you will need to remove the BankVault Key before rebooting.

You may wish to copy a .ABA banking file from your accounting system into BankVault for paying a large list of creditors.
You can map a network drive on your PC and Mac to an independent storage area accessible by BankVault.

PC

1. Launch File Manager and right click on “Computer”. Select “Map Network Drive” and a “Drive letter”. In the field called Folder enter: “https://webdav.bankvaultonline.com/Documents”. (Note: “https” not “HTTP”.) Press Finish.
2. A log-in box appears requesting your BankVault user-name and password. The new drive letter is mapped, and you can now copy files into it like a networked drive.
3. After your PC is rebooted then, Microsoft Windows does not allow this drive to remain active. Right click on the Drive letter and select “Disconnect”. Once cleared you can map the drive again using the command above.

Mac

1. In the Finder, choose “Go” and click “Connect to Server”.
2. Enter https://webdav.bankvaultonline.com/Documents/ in the Server Address field
3. Click Connect.

Office network requirement installation: Your PC needs to be able to send requests to TCP port 22 (for SSH transport) and TCP port 443 (for HTTPS requests) to servers outside of their local network.

For network bandwidth, users will need to have a connection of 100KBps.

Antivirus software is great. We encourage you to keep using it, antivirus and other types of security software fulfil an important role in keeping your computer safe. But it’s not comprehensive and still relies on variables such as timely updates and global threat monitoring service responses.

Use BankVault when you just need to be certain about your security.

Nearly all antivirus software works by monitoring your computer and network for malicious files which it recognises based on the ‘signature’ of the file. This is an efficient way to work in the background of your computer without impacting its performance. Your antivirus software regularly updates its ‘list’ of signatures to watch out for by checking in with its vendor headquarters about the latest risks.

The problem for antivirus is that a complete list of all possible dangerous signatures that ever existed would need to be billions of signature long. That’s far too big and complex for most computers to handle without impacting your system’s performance.

Vendors get around this by maintaining a ‘current’ list of a few million signatures on your computer, and sending out regular updates to your software for emerging, re-emerging or new threat types.

Advanced antivirus and security software also introduces other approaches such as monitoring your computer for unexpected or risky ‘behaviour’.

Combined, and thanks to the diligence of antivirus companies, this works well, but it is still constantly playing catch-up with the latest and ever-changing smorgasbord of threats circulating in the wild.

Other malware types can be difficult for antivirus to detect. Many of the Ransomware attacks over recent years actually use the high-quality encryption built-in to your operating system against you. Your antivirus won’t try to prevent your own computer from encrypting its files, and the encryption is so good, there is no unlocking it without the key—time to pay!

BankVault does away with all of this catch up and indefinite approaches by removing your computer—the antivirus on it and any malware that got past it—from the situation.

BankVault doesn’t sit there to be targeted. It gives you access to a pristine computer, virus-free, just created, safely hidden, far away, and soon to vanish.

This is an interesting question. A data centre is a highly secured computer environment, much like a bank. It’s protected and monitored with far greater levels of security than any home or business computer. But that’s not really why it’s secure for you.

Your BankVault virtual machine, when it’s created in the data centre, exists only as data spread across the facility’s numerous servers by virtualisation, load balancing, and other data centre management software. An attacker who did get access to the data centre would still not be able to access anything tangible.

Furthermore, your session is temporary. You will never be there for very long, or in the same place again.

Most cyber-attacks require a target computer which can be reached. A randomly appearing and moving computer becomes close to impossible to attack. A virtual machine can be easily generated in random locations, and then erased. Anything that ‘could’ be done to the virtual machine while it did exist, is pointless because it vanishes. An attacker would need to locate the next random one and start all over again.

The best thing BankVault does is give you security to be certain about. Many people have either been hacked or have heard of friends or other business that have been hacked. None of them realised until it was too late.

• If you’ve ever entered personal or sensitive company information on a website,
• If you’ve ever made financial or credit card transactions online,
• If you’ve ever used a website to manage private or sensitive data,

…you’ve probably also blindly trusted that everything went OK. BankVault gives you a way of being certain you’re safe and secure doing these things online.

BankVault will save you from financial loss, downtime, brand damage and embarrassment.

VPN’s provide a level of security for a specific elements of computing but are not a blanket security system.

They are typically used for point-to-point tunnels through the Internet. By using a VPN someone lurking on a local router cannot interpret the data as it is routed through. It can be useful to your PC with a remote IP address for example in the USA if you want to download content restricted to USA IP numbers. That also makes your activity invisible to your local ISP and prevents them capturing meta data about your activities.

VPN’s however do not address endpoint security. That is the security on your local PC/smartphone. Depending on how you’ve configured it, your traffic may not be forced to use a VPN each time you browse the Internet or download email. If you’re paying a VPN provider you are trusting their controls are adequately configured however they often vary. Also there’s no absolute restriction on what your PC can access on the Internet so it’s actually largely wide-open and so remains vulnerable to attack. For example:

• You may receive an email attachment with malware such as a keylogger. Anti-virus won’t pick it up because it was just crafted yesterday and only released to 100 endpoint devices before the author modified it and sent out a different variant to the rest of his target market. These never get picked up by anti-virus software. In fact Symantec said recently that there’s 1,000,000 new variants released every 24 hours. The processes of morphing and releasing are automated.
• Drive-by-download is where you browse a website and malware is downloaded and executes in the browser when you display an image. This is a common vector for the latest man-in-the-browser hacking that target banking login credentials. They’re easy to set up and they’re becoming very common. For example Telstra’s website was infected with one last year which targeted banking credentials. Anyone would pick it up purely by going to Telstra’s website and your anti-virus software won’t stop it because it’s not a virus.
• If you install a new software package then you’re trusting that supplier. But it goes further. There are all sorts of cracks and fissures between the different software packages and versions configured on your device. These are what the the hackers exploit. VPN’s can’t address any of these issues.
• Anti-virus software products Trend and Symantec last year were named as the back-door being used by hackers to install their malware. This was detailed in two separate announcements two separate broadcasts by Google Security team.
• According to McAfee the average time a hacker has infiltrated a PC or network before they attack is 293 days. They are undetectable. Once they are into your PC they’re effectively sitting in your lap and ready to take over your keyboard whenever they choose. A VPN makes absolutely no difference.

BankVault addresses the cyber security issue by doing things completely differently. It’s conceptually simple to understand and is easy to use. It comprehensively addresses every attack vector by simply sidestepping everything for the duration of critical online transactions such as banking. It can be provided as a dedicated hardware device to it can recycle the users existing PC hardware and even bypass BIOS or wireless keyboard sniffing.

So in an era where bank account hacking is growing exponentially and bank’s need to investigate before negotiating reimbursements, any delay can be crippling for cashflow and BankVault offers simple pristine protection.

BankVault is secure because is it uses the cumulative effect of different techniques to provide a definitive comprehensive level of security. Combined into BankVault’s solution, all possible threats are eliminated.

• Virtual
• Remote
• Temporary
• Random
• Secret
• Pristine
• Untraceable

When you go online with BankVault you are:

• Immune to threats that require a physical computer and its software to attack
• Moved (technically, not literally) far away from your computer, which is the weakest link in the chain and where most attacks, virus and security problems occur.
• Working somewhere that won’t exist for long enough to attack
• Working somewhere different every time
• Working somewhere that is not identifiable as your computer
• Working via a clean, perfect, pristine, up-to-date, secure and safe computer every time

From a technical perspective your location is hidden. Your BankVault session, for the short time it appears, would seem to anyone who could find it (and they won’t) to be sitting somewhere on the internet (BankVault’s secure data centre). Your session is allocated a shared IP, which is changed each time you start a new session. This protects your location, your privacy, and your identity.

Add to this that your session is temporary. Everything you do with it will vanish, impossible to track, hack or attack.

Under Australian Privacy Law, BankVault is obliged to record a timestamp whenever you logon to our service.

BankVault is extremely concerned about protecting our customer’s privacy and anonymity. All our products are designed so you have no online footprint unless you choose to do so.

Yes! Malware (a general term for malicious software including spyware, adware, viruses, and other damaging and intrusive programs) have taken a more dangerous turn with the rise of ransomware programs such as cryptolocker. Ransomware hijacks the files that are stored on your computer, and holds them to ransom. People have had to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to regain access to their files… assuming the hijackers ever return the documents.

Personal financial data, family digital photo files, private documents, and work files are all vulnerable to ransomware threats. Holders of these documents are prime targets for ransomware hijackers.

Using BankVault eliminates any threat from malware threats such as ransomware, because you can operate in the safe virtual computer environment that is separate from your computer. Malware cannot install on your computer from the virtual computer environment, and so it cannot affect your operating system or reach your important documents.

Banks have tighter security than households and most businesses. The easiest way for them to hit pay day is to target your personal computer. 90% of all financial cyber heists are via “protected” PCs, smartphones, and tablets via unsecure home or work internet connections, through public Wi-Fi, or visiting a website that contains hidden malware. Security banking fobs and SMS confirmation codes fail to protect from these tactics.

Once your computer is infected, a hacker can spy on you as you type in your passwords, do your work, watch videos of your family and friends, and even access your computer’s webcam and microphone. Hackers can watch you for weeks or months, discovering your online behaviours to know when you make transfers or receive funds, in order to time their attacks for the biggest score.

BankVault is a simple technology that stops back account hacking and secures all your online transactions. You’ll never need to worry about bank account hacking or identity theft with BankVault.

Hackers do not target the banks. Instead, they target your personal computer. 99% all financial cyber heists are via “protected” PCs, smartphones, and tablets via unsecure home or work internet connections, through public Wi-Fi, or visiting a website that contains hidden malware. Security banking fobs and SMS confirmation codes fail to protect from these tactics.

Once your computer is infected, a hacker can spy on you and secretly watch while you type in your passwords, as well as access your computer’s camera and microphone, and steal your personal identity data. Hackers can watch you for weeks or months, discovering your online behaviours to know when you make transfers or receive funds, in order to time their attacks for the biggest score.

BankVault is a simple technology that stops back account hacking and secures all your online transactions. You’ll never need to worry about bank account hacking or identity theft with BankVault.

Banks investigate theft from accounts, and often replace funds when they can determine a legitimate theft. Investigations can take weeks or months, depending on the circumstances.

If you have a trust account, it can be a slow and painstaking investigation. The worst part is that you have to replace stolen funds within 24 hours.

While a bank investigation proceeds, you will not have your stolen funds replaced until a final report is completed. If you cannot cover the missing funds – unlikely if thieves have had access to all of your accounts – you’ll be left without cash for an unknown period of time.