 Secure Login
If members login to your website and are viewing personal financial information over the Internet, your website will need to encrypt their information. This prevents their information being intercepted by clever hackers with possible malicious intent.
 Data can be intercepted, read and even changed as it passes from the website to the member’s personal computer. This information may be highly sensitive, such as account balances, usernames, passwords and addresses. To prevent this, a special formula is applied to the data before it leaves the web server. This formula encrypts the data using a strong algorithm which is virtually impossible to break. The only person who can decrypt the data is the member who logs on to view their account.
The building blocks of this secure login are digital certificates. Every credit union website should have a digital certificate installed on the server which hosts their website. The certificate is unique to every credit union, and is issued by a company which is recognized as an authority as far as digital certificates are concerned.
 Working hand in hand with the digital certificate is the secure website address. This is frequently in the format https://secure.website.com. Note the s in https. The s indicates that a secure protocol will be used to display the encrypted page (as opposed to the non-secure http which most websites use). While it is not strictly necessary to use secure in parts of your website that are encrypted, it does inspire confidence and is much easier to administer.
So next time, you click the login button on your website, notice how the address in the address bar changes. You may even get a pop-up message stating you are entering a secure area of the website. Notice again the address change when you logout, and visit another part of your website.
Its all in the interest of data security.
The CU@HOME Team | 
08 September 2010
