online shopping

letsbehonest

I have always been lead to believe that before making a purchase online, you should always check for the closed yellow padlock symbol at the bottom of the screen and that the website address is preceeded with https:// rather than http://. I have just tried to use a site which states it uses a secure ssl server and it displays the "Thawte" symbol but have backed away because of the above.
Any thoughts or guidance on this subject would be appreciated.
regards

Curry_Queen

I had a similar problem recently whereby I had selected the items I wanted to buy but when I went to checkout it didn't display the secure padlock symbol so I cancelled it. I emailed the company to complain and tell them they'd just lost a sale due to it and they replied stating that if I'd gone to the next stage in checkout it would have re-directed me to a different merchants site to take payment which was apparently secure. I haven't gone back to check it, but I do know some online retailers do use a secondary merchant site to process payments - i.e. Worldpay etc.

tigermatt

If you use a secondary merchant site then these are always secure. Providing your credit card number isn't being input on the unsecure area then you should be fine.

When entering credit card numbers, you should always make sure that you have the padlock symbol or that the padlock is "closed" depending on your browser. Also make sure the web address is prefixed with https:// as opposed to http:// (the extra s stands for secure - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) Also make sure you are on the correct site and you haven't been taken to some bogus site that looks like the actual one. A common mistake is mixing letters around in a well known site name as scammer will purchase such domain names and make the site look official and similar.

sra

They discuss this on Security Now Episode 20

http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-020.htm
Skip to time: 12:45
(or you can read the transcript there)

tigermatt

Wouldn't this thread be more applicable on the Techie Board?