How to create a safe environment
Important: Before proceeding with this tutorial, make sure you have read and understood this Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Security Best Practices Manual.
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As you know, the most complicated part in the world of cryptocurrencies is to operate them safely in an environment where we do not run the risk that a virus or any type of malware that we have on the computer can give access to our funds to third parties.
That is why we are going to see some simple steps to have a very safe environment in our usual computer.
What is a secure environment?
A computer in a secure environment is:
– A computer disconnected from the wifi network, wireless and bluetooth.
– With an operating system with minimal software installed and running in the background.
– Operating system with updated software.
What are we going to do?
The easiest way to achieve this is to use a Linux live USB and install the necessary software on the fly.
This will not affect our computer: it consists of obtaining a clean operating system very quickly, which we run from an external USB.
For this we will need a USB pendrive of a certain quality (with an advertising one there can be speed problems and crashes).
On that pendrive we will download a version of the Linux operating system. We will boot the computer with the pendrive connected and, when booting, we will be in a clean operating system, without the possibility of any virus from our computer affecting it or collecting information from what we do on it.
How are we going to do it?
Step 1: Once we have purchased the pendrive we go to https://elementary.io/es/ and we download the file that we indicate. We can contribute some money or give a custom price and put zero and let us download elementary OS.
We are going to download it to our computer. Not on the pendrive, which we will use to do the installation.
Step 2: Go to https://www.balena.io/etcher/ and download the program. We choose the version of our computer. This program will help us to put Linux on the USB.
Step 3: We connect our pendrive to the USB port of the computer and run the balenaEtcher program we just downloaded.
Step 4: We choose the Flash from file option and choose the file we have downloaded.
Then it asks us to choose the destination and we choose the directory of the pendrive and we execute. What it is going to do is to “put” the operating system in the USB pendrive.
Step 5: Now we can turn off the computer. When we turn it on, we have to have the pendrive connected and we will press F12 while the computer boots (if your computer does not work with F12 it can be F8 or consult the characteristics of your terminal to know how to boot the operating system from the pendrive).
Step 6: It will ask us if we want to boot from USB.
We choose the option and when booting it will give us the option to install or try demo mode.
We choose the option to test in demo mode that Linux distribution from the USB, without installing it.
Last step: Once started, we connect to the internet and we can download the Brave browser, the Metamask wallet or Electrum.
Once we have everything installed, we disconnect the internet, remove the cameras that can “snoop” on what we are doing and generate our passwords as we explained in the tutorial on how to generate your wallet.
Everything can be done safely and, when we turn off the computer, the USB with Linux will not remember anything and will be as good as new.