Look for a padlock symbol, keep your personal details secure
By Stefan Dominik
- 2nd April 2009
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Ever paid for your stuff online? You are more than likely to use your credit/debit card as a payment method. But have you ever thought whether your card or login details are secure? Read more to see how you can protect yourself.
When you browse websites, you are submitting requests for content of the page between your computer and the computer (server) where the website is being hosted. The route could be quite long - it goes via a lot of channels. So it's likely that there are some bad guys watching over and looking for specific information that could be useful to them.
All information is wrapped up in html code, but it's still a simple text form. Just have a look at "Page >> View Source". In this form it also travels when the http protocol is used.
To make sure sensitive information is secure, many websites use the https protocol (s stands for secure). It means that information is encrypted using an SSL certificate i.e. turned into some sort of gibberish using sophisticated algorithms, before it gets sent between the computers, and then it's decrypted back on the other end.
Therefore if someone is watching, they stand no chance to find 16 digits or your card number.
So, to keep yourself secure, watch out for a padlock symbol in a corner of your browser, or look up to the URL address bar and check if the address starts with https:// rather than http://
In some rare cases, it is possible for the page to be secure even without displaying these indicators. If you are not sure, it's better to be safe than sorry.