SSL,new,weapon,combating,inter DIY EV SSL: A new weapon in combating internet fraud
When starting a new work at home business it is very easy to become consumed by it. We spend so much time trying to get the business up and running that we may end up becoming burned out and lose our motivation. There is so much to learn and Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in
The internet has revolutionized our lives by making billions of pages of information available to us. It has changed the way we work, do business, entertain ourselves and shop for interesting products. The internet has done away with physical boundaries by turning the whole world into a global marketplace. The amount of business transactions involving credit card details and other sensitive financial information is staggering and numbers in the millions every day. It was understood long before the proliferation of e-commerce that the sensitive financial information of customers can easily be compromised as it passes through dozens of computers all around the world to reach its destination. To ensure the protection of this sensitive information, a global standard for security was developed by the name of Secure Sockets Layer or SSL.SSL is a communication protocol that works by scrambling the sensitive data through a process called encryption. Encryption allows only the authorized parties to view the information. Hackers and other criminals can still get their hands on encrypted data but it is basically useless to them. To extract the original information from the encrypted data, hackers have to use brute-force decryption methods. Fortunately, most secure websites support 128-bit SSL encryption. This encryption is strong enough so that it can take hundreds of years to decrypt it through brute force methods. SSL promised to allow people to share their credit card details on shopping websites and access their bank account information without having to worry about their financial information getting into the wrong hands. SSL is used to validate the identity of the e-commerce website so that the customers know for sure that their information wont be sent to some fraudulent website. Once identity is established, SSL creates a secure connection between the website and the customers. Websites are authenticated by their SSL certificates that are issued by a trusted company known as a Certificate Authority or CA. One of the most trusted CAs in the world is Verisign. Despite all its merits, SSL suffered from a serious flaw. Any website could sign its own SSL certificates and thus make itself appear genuine. The average internet user didnt know much about distinguishing between self-signed and CA-signed SSL certificates. This allowed fraudulent websites to steal sensitive business information from unwitting customers. The stealing of information in this way is referred to as a phishing scam. With the rapidly increasing incidences of phishing scams, consumer confidence in online transactions was dangerously eroded to the extent that online businesses began to suffer substantially. The Extended Validation SSL standard was developed to win back consumer confidence through stringent certificate verification and visual display in highly secure internet browsers like IE7 and Firefox 3. When customers visit a website using an EV SSL certificate, the URL address bar of the browser turns green indicating that the site can be trusted. The organizational identity and name of the CA such as Verisign is also shown next to the green bar to further provide proof that the website is not fraudulent. Since EV SSL certificates can only be acquired from a well-known CA, the chances of phishing scams have greatly diminished and consumer confidence in online business transactions has been restored. All we need to do now to protect ourselves from phishers is to look for the green bar and thats it.
SSL,new,weapon,combating,inter