It is the major shopping season of the year now. For some companies they make all their profit between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the rest of the year is a loss. Now more and more people are doing their shopping online. A couple of suggestions to make your online shopping more secure.

First make sure the site you are going to enter your credit card and other personal information is a secure site. To do this you need to do several things. First make sure it is secure site and to do that see if it says https:// in front of the name or has a lock showing on the address line that is in the locked position. The s after http says it is a secure site. If it says http instead it is not secure and the information is not encrypted and any one with ability to listen to web traffic can steal the information. Also make sure the site is really part of the organization you are buying from or giving to. Look at the address of the page. See what comes right after https:// or that it starts with. I don’t sell things on my site but use as an example if I did. If you were buying from me then immediately after https:// or just by itself you should see a word (often www) then a period then the name of the site (in my case dwightwatt.com). Then you may see some more stuff after a slash. The stuff after slash is pages in the site and can sound like real site. So someone wanting to steal money from my customers may create a site that says http://steal.com/dwightwatt.com/shop and if you were just looking at whole thing would think you were at my site since says dwightwatt.com but really you were at crooks site steal.com

Second do your shopping and giving on secure networks. Using a wired network connection is best. If you are using wi-fi then it needs to be a secure connection (requires you to enter a password to the network). Don’t use a wide open network like restaurants and motels have for public wi-fi to shop on as people can steal what you send in the air signal. However those networks are great for browsing the Internet and doing non-secure items.

Have a good holiday season