When is a website truly secure?
- Knowledge
The problem.
Unless you live in a cave for some reason, you will have heard of cases where some people have been taken advantage of by websites that either had malicious intentions or were not secure enough allowing hackers to steal data from visitors. Lack of security is one of the biggest problems we face in the world of technology and the internet. The question is how we can know if a website is safe to visit. In this article we will look at 3 ways to reduce our chances of becoming a victim of online spying as well.
1. Check before visiting a website.
The first step we can take to protect ourselves is, before we click on the website link, to copy and paste it into a threat scanning tool that will show us if there are threats and viruses. The best known tool to check a link is ScamAdviser. Just paste the link you want to check there and after waiting a few seconds, it will show you the security level of the website from 1% to 100%.
2. SSL certificate.
So after you have checked with the above tool and decided to visit a website, now you can do something else very important. All browsers have an icon that shows us if a website has a valid SSL certificate. The icon is usually located on the left side of the address bar and is a padlock. If the padlock is closed, it indicates that the website provides some kind of security. But if you notice that the padlock is open then you should be careful as the website does not have a certificate. Of course, even if the padlock is closed, no one can guarantee that there is security all the time. We are in the internet world and never will everything be 100% secure.
3. Use of common sense.
The most important step when using the internet and wanting to do so in a safe way is to think and use common sense. What does that mean? It means that many websites and eShops on their own look strange. Warning! It doesn’t mean they are actually weird or malicious, but they just look that way. But they can be. So as we make use of them we may see things that will lead us to the conclusion that something is wrong. Some of these might be poor translation of text or poor quality images and buttons that we don’t know where they lead to. Our aim should always be to feel safe when browsing the pages of a website. If we don’t feel that way it is probably better to leave it and not register within it.
Conclusion.
We don’t want to scare you with all this. In fact, if there’s going to be an attack on our personal information, it’s going to happen anyway. No system can guarantee us complete security. But it is certain that if we are careful ourselves and take advantage of these 3 ways, we will be much more protected. Happy surfing!