December 1, 2011

Online security, you've heard many things regarding how secure your information is when purchasing items on the Internet, so what's up with that?  I discussed this on the surface in 2003, so now I'll give you a more in depth analysis.

Well, it's true you should be careful when you are giving information, particularly credit card, or personal information out, but that applies to anywhere.  Giving voice information via a regular phone line is less secure than using a secure web site.  People can hack into phone lines very easily.  Giving voice, or other information out over a cell phone is like giving information out over a two way radio, probably the lease secure of all methods.

When you purchase an item and send information to the seller, you want to make sure it is done on a secure site.  When you are surfing the web, your computer goes through several computers in order to get to the final destination.  For instance, if you want to see how many different computers your computer goes through, just start a command prompt, then type in the address with the tracert command (in this example, I'll use tracert www.google.com).

You can see that, for my computer, right now, I'm going through 10 hops just to get to the Google homepage.  If I were to send data back and forth to the Google server, the data would be out there for the world to access.

If I'm going to give out any information, I want to make sure the site has a secure server which uses SSL (secure socket layers) to send data back and forth.  In laymen's terms, that means the data is encrypted so no one can tell what information it is, only you and the seller.  There a several things you want to look for.  First, the address should be something like https://www.{sitename}. The s at the end of http means it is a secure site.  Also, if you're using Internet Explorer 9, you should have an icon which looks like a paddle lock on the right side of the address bar.

Older versions of IE will have an icon, like below, at the bottom right corner of the screen.

Firefox should have an icon, like below, on the bottom left.

Whatever browser you are using should have an indication that the site is a secure site.  You can click on the icon to get further information on the security the site has.  There are many different companies providing secure site software for vendors, but the main thing you want to make sure of is that it is there, and working.

As long as you make sure of the security, you should be able to purchase, confident that your information won't end up in the wrong hands.