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Website owners need to ensure the safety of people who visit their websites. While some websites take all safety measures and ensure visitors have a safe browsing experience, some need to be more secure. Such unsafe websites could steal your information, making you a victim of cybersecurity threats. Such websites also spread malware. To prevent yourself from becoming a victim of online threats, you must ensure the website you visit is safe to browse and make transactions.
With a button, you can do everything online, from buying groceries to paying your bills. However, not all such transactions are safe. Some criminals track your monetary transactions to steal your personal information and money.
Scammers set up fake websites that look more like genuine banking websites and trick you into providing your banking information. To avoid all this, you have to ensure you visit your bank’s website that it is secured. But how can you figure out if the website you visit takes your privacy and safety seriously? Here are a few signs that indicate the website you visit is safe.
SSL Certificate
When visiting a website, look for “HTTPS” in the URL. An SSL certificate indicates that the website you are visiting is safe to browse and make transactions on. You have to ensure the URL of the website you visit starts with “HTTPS.” If yes, then the website is secure with an SSL certificate. This way, you can be assured that the data you send will travel through an encrypted tunnel from your browser to the server of the website you are visiting, thereby keeping your data safe and secure. SSL certificates protect sensitive information that is sent to the website’s server.
If an SSL certificate does not secure the website, the information you send will not be encrypted, and hackers and cybercriminals can easily access your personal information. Make it a habit to check whether the website’s URL starts with “HTTPS” whenever you make a transaction, provide personal information, or generally browse the web.
Website Privacy Policy
Almost all websites have privacy policies. If the website you visited does not look legitimate, you can look for the website’s privacy policy. The website’s privacy policy will indicate what steps the respective website is taking to protect its visitors’ private data. It will have info on the data that the website will share with any third party and the data that will remain private. You can find the link to the website’s privacy at the bottom of the site’s homepage. Alternatively, you can type privacy policy in the search bar and find the website’s privacy policy. Check out the website’s privacy policy before sharing your data to ensure it remains safe and secure. Legitimate websites have a privacy policy; checking the site’s privacy policy will take seconds before giving your personal information.
Trust Seal
Like “HTTPS,” specific other visual trust indicators will help you determine whether or not the website is legitimate. You will see trust seals on websites secured with an SSL certificate. You will see trust seals with terms like “Verified” or “Secure.” These seals are provided by the Certificate Authorities that issue SSL certificates. Certificate authorities like Sectigo, GeoTrust, etc., offer trust seals on the website, indicating that the site is secure for safe transactions. You can click on the site seal to know more details about the website’s SSL certificate and ensure it is legitimate. However, some seals may be static and not clickable, indicating the site has security.
Check the Website’s URL
Scammers create fraudulent websites that look just like the actual website. Though the URL may “look” like the actual website, they cannot duplicate it. So, when you are about to transact on a website, you can check the URL to ensure you visit the original website, not the fake one. Many fall prey to such fraudulent websites as they fail to check the website’s URL before they make a transaction. You might come across websites with URLs that have digits instead of letters. You can easily make out such websites.
Website Contact Information
Websites that value their visitors and want you to do business with them will have their contact information. Contact information includes phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses. You will not find any such information on a fake website. This is a big red flag. If not, you might find information that is irrelevant to the company. For example, an American-based company might have an address and phone number of a foreign country. If you see something like that, do not trust the site and make any transaction; it could be a scam.
Website Design and Style
You can determine whether a website is legitimate by looking at its design and style. Most websites that look to gain users’ trust take steps to build their brand by using color schemes, logos, and slogans. This may be different from fake websites that only look legitimate. Such websites duplicate the original ones and will only be slightly different from the original website. You will come across typos, broken links, and plagiarized content. Such things indicate that the site is fishy. To protect yourself and your data, all you can do is type in the URL of the site you wish to visit with HTTPS and visit the legitimate site.
Check Who Owns the Domain
There is a way to look at who owns a domain. You can use Whois Lookup to research a specific domain. This way, you can find and verify who the owner of the domain is. Whois domain information will have the name of the organization or person who owns the domain and the contact information. It will help you determine whether the website you are visiting is legitimate. You can compare this information with the website to see if both match. If not, the website may not be legitimate and could be a fake site run by fraudsters.
With many online scammers and hackers trying to scam people online through fake websites, it is essential to be aware of the cybersecurity threats and take the required steps to stay away from such threats online. Now that you know how to check whether a website is secure, here are a few tips on keeping yourself and your data safe.
Steps to Protect Yourself if You Land on a Spammy Website
Some websites have many warnings and pop-ups. If you witness pop-ups when you visit a website, the best thing you can do to keep your data safe is to close the site immediately.
Malicious redirects are something you need to be aware of. If redirected from the website you initially visited another website, it could be a malicious redirect. It means the original site you visited is not a legitimate website. It could also mean that the original website you visited is hacked. Though the original site might not be fake, it could have been attacked by hackers who have injected malicious code. You must immediately close the site if redirected to a different website.
If you see search engine warnings like “This site might be hacked, Visiting this site may be harmful to your computer, The website has been reported unsafe, Phishing attack ahead,” etc., it is a good idea to navigate away from that website.
Summary
Only some websites are secure, so it is essential to know whether the website you are visiting is safe for making transactions. If you happen to land on a website that looks spammy, you have to take the required precautions to ensure you do not become a victim of cybersecurity threats, which will, in turn, help you protect your data.
Author Bio: Kalpesh Patel is an experienced Software Consultant with extensive experience in the security industry. She is skilled in Data Analytics, PKI, Code Signing, and Software Development.