Preparing to commence in the annual holiday shopping?
Here's a tip on how to ensure that your shopping in a safe manner during this holiday season. The quickest and most basic way to ensure your connection is secure is to check that the website you are purchasing from is using SSL. “Secure Sockets Layer" (SSL) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browser remain private.” (SSL.com) Basically, if the site you are visiting wants to collect your information from an email to a credit card, you will want it to be a secure connection. This guarantees that the data transfer stays between just you and the site.
How it works:
SSL is set up as the green light to signal you that it is safe to share personal/sensitive data with the website that you are using. Have you noticed the lock in the browser towards the upper left bar when you are navigating to secure web pages? (This sometimes only appears on sites when you are at checkout, entering a password, etc., but it can be enabled throughout an entire website) Yes, that lock is your indication that the web page you are using is safe and reliable!
Even now Google is requiring web pages to become more secure to reduce the amount of attacks and threats that users face. The Chrome browser started giving warnings a while back when people visited sites without SSL enabled. This secure means of data transfer can be purchased like a domain through hosting companies and is surprisingly reliable in fending off unwanted data leaks and security risks.
Even our site has Secure Sockets Layer enabled! So if you were to subscribe to our resources page for further updates, none of your info would go to anyone but us! Great, huh?
Try to be safe during this holiday season!
Cybersecurity can be scary, but we hope we can calm for of those fears!
Lighthouse IT Solutions hosted a webinar (October 31st 2019) in which we went over the many things you should be aware of in order to help keep you safe in this digital world