Protect yourself and your customers from data breaches

Published by admin at January 21, 2019

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In this day and age, we have to be very careful with our information. It seems to be compromised by different businesses a LOT. In 2018 Panera Bread disclosed that 37 million personal records had been breached in 2017. The breach happened on the panerabread.com website, where millions of patrons sign up with personal information to receive discounts and order online.

We also heard about the Facebook data breach in 2018, where 30 million people had their personal information compromised. Things such as religion, birthdays, location and relationship status can be used against you. It may sound like no big deal, but some security experts think that this could be worse that someone stealing your social security or credit card number. Accessing your private communications and posts can be used to crack account security questions or scam you and your friends.

The culprit in all of these attacks? Their website! It was compromised by hackers to steal the information.
Now, your business’s website may not be as big or useful as Panera and Facebook, but you still need to protect it. Your first step should be to install an SSL certificate.

What’s an SSL certificate?

The easiest way to explain it is, it’s an encryption key. It encrypts the data between your website and the server it’s hosted on, thus encrypting (or jumbling up) the contents if it gets intercepted in between. Think of it like when you are telling a friend a secret that you don’t want other people in the room to hear. It’s not enough to just whisper it to your friend, if you also put your hand up to block the noise, others can only hear a jumbled version of what was said, and they don’t get the information. Your hand is like an SSL certificate for the information your trying to share with a friend.

This is an example of a site with no SSL certificate.

An example of a good SSL certificate.

Where can you get an SSL certificate?

Because this is about communication between your website and the host server, the best place to get an SSL certificate for your website is from your webhost. Some hosts will charge you extra for an SSL certificate or they will charge you a yearly fee for SLL. At StevensLabs, all of our websites are secure, and it comes with our service. Why do we do this? Because if one website on our server gets compromised by a breach, it affects the rest of them by using up the server’s resources.

What are the benefits of an SSL certificate?

We have learned above why protecting your business and customer information is so important. But, there are more benefits from an SSL certificate than just protecting your customer’s information when they are using your website.

Increases your google ranking.

Most websites will only have an SSL certificate on the payment page of their website, to protect the credit card information of the user. But, in Google’s never-ending research of data and Search Optimization, they have found, that website without an SSL certificate are less trustworthy, and often result in a customer receiving bad business. So, Google will rank websites with an SSL certificate over a website that doesn’t have an SSL certificate.

Gain trust from potential customers.

In July 2018, Google has started labeling websites without SSL with a big red “un-secure” label, which doesn’t look good to potential customers. Google has stated that has time goes on, they will do more to warn users that a website isn’t secure.

Having an SSL certificate is step number one in a long list of security measures that need to be taken to protect your information. But for small town business, that doesn’t use its website for more than information, an SSL certificate may be all you need to protect yourself, and be viewed as trustworthy. If your website does not have an SSL certificate, and you need help getting it, StevensLabs is always willing to help.