What is a secure internet connection?
As the Internet takes up more and more space in our lives, the risk of our personal information falling into the wrong hands increases. This also applies to personal correspondence, and banking data, and passport numbers and telephone numbers.A secure internet connection can minimize the loss of such valuable information. However, https alone is not a guarantee for your internet safety and privacy. The only and most efficient way of securing your connection is considering a high-quality VPN, such as NordVPN.
There are several types of connections on the Internet. We’ll talk about two of them.In order not to boggle your head with terms, let’s just say: a regular connection is when the site name looks like http: // … and a secure connection when the site name starts with https.
What does the letter “S” mean?
Without getting into technical details, let’s start with the fact that this letter S from the English word secure is safe. The connection uses Secure Sockets Layer SSL technology – a secure data transfer service. This technology encrypts all data that you send to the site (more precisely, to the site server) – it is very convenient to use it to transfer such important information as confidential information, passwords and credit card numbers.
History
Initially, the https: // protocol was used to verify users when they entered personal information ( credit card number, passport, login-password ). This was mainly done in online banking and online stores.
Gradually, as people began to care more about the security of their data online, both search engines and social networks joined this process.
At the very beginning, social networks used a secure connection only when entering a login-password, and then the communication process proceeded as usual (http: //). Now users have the ability to encrypt all communication with the server, not just their login and password.
How does encryption work?
In simple words, it is a network of networks. There are many networks that are interconnected. Let’s say you are trying to access Facebook from your home computer. You are on your provider’s network. Your ISP has its own ISP. All major providers are networked. While your request reaches Facebook servers in the US, it goes through dozens of providers and dozens of networks. In normal mode, attackers ( who are somewhere between your computer and Facebook servers ) can simply open your connection and read the data that you sent to the server.
When using the https: protocol, there is an agreement between the server and your computer. By this agreement, only your computer and the server know the secret “word” ( key) by which the data is encrypted. However, https protocol is not that safe unless you use a good quality VPN service, for example PureVPN. In this case, even if an attacker gains access to your data, he will not be able to read it, since all data is encrypted, and the attackers do not have a password to decode.
Facebook has an option with which the user can encrypt their data. To do this in your account settings (account settings) to go to the point of “Safety» (security ), and put a check mark under “Secure Browsing (https)».
Today, services such as Twitter or Google have switched to automatic data encryption and use an https: connection by default.
Next time, when entering personal information or placing an online order through your credit card, make sure that your connection is secure and that the same letter “S” is in the url.