Why might you want to air gap your computer?

Sunday, November 4, 2018

First what is an air gap? Basically it’s usually a term used regarding physical separation of single or multiple devices from each other. Basically in order to ensure network security and prevent data penetration a computer is located in a remote isolated location away from unsecured networks and it is electronically disconnected from other networks completely.

In high security situations the computer or network may not have any wired or wireless connections to outside networks. And the only way to actually transfer data to the outside world is to use a removable storage medium such as a floppy disk or USB flash drive to physically move the storage of data to some other location. This ensures highly controlled access. However this can be tedious in some instances. Some viruses have been able to take advantage of this.

While these are usually involve mission critical systems which involve crucial military data and financial information, it is sometimes a good idea for your own home office that you should have an old PC that you strip of wireless and wired connections to store some data. Earlier computers were easily without means to access a network and many of them just had 5.25″ floppy drives or 3.5″ floppy disks.

If you still have an older computer it may not be able to store crucial data but it may be smart to have a local LAN that’s not attached to the Internet that you can store data on. Another idea is to have verified data transferred into this computer with a CD, DVD or other non-Internet method of transfer once the data has been certified to be free from viruses, malware, trojans, spyware, adware, and other keyloggers.

Nowadays security is even more crucial so consider sandboxing your programs and having some of your programs running in a separate instance or virtual environment that separates it from any damage to other parts of your system.

You can never be too careful.

For more information see this article: https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/air-gapped-computer/